Rattikorn Hewett

Zhou Yang, Spencer Bradshaw, Rattikorn Hewett et al.

The United States is currently experiencing an unprecedented opioid crisis, and opioid overdose has become a leading cause of injury and death. Effective opioid addiction recovery calls for not only medical treatments, but also behavioral interventions for impacted individuals. In this paper, we study communication and behavior patterns of patients with opioid use disorder (OUD) from social media, intending to demonstrate how existing information from common activities, such as online social networking, might lead to better prediction, evaluation, and ultimately prevention of relapses. Through a multi-disciplinary and advanced novel analytic perspective, we characterize opioid addiction behavior patterns by analyzing opioid groups from Reddit.com - including modeling online discussion topics, analyzing text co-occurrence and correlations, and identifying emotional states of people with OUD. These quantitative analyses are of practical importance and demonstrate innovative ways to use information from online social media, to create technology that can assist in relapse prevention.

Vibhuti Gupta, Rattikorn Hewett

Twitter is a popular social network platform where users can interact and post texts of up to 280 characters called tweets. Hashtags, hyperlinked words in tweets, have increasingly become crucial for tweet retrieval and search. Using hashtags for tweet topic classification is a challenging problem because of context dependent among words, slangs, abbreviation and emoticons in a short tweet along with evolving use of hashtags. Since Twitter generates millions of tweets daily, tweet analytics is a fundamental problem of Big data stream that often requires a real-time Distributed processing. This paper proposes a distributed online approach to tweet topic classification with hashtags. Being implemented on Apache Storm, a distributed real time framework, our approach incrementally identifies and updates a set of strong predictors in the Naïve Bayes model for classifying each incoming tweet instance. Preliminary experiments show promising results with up to 97% accuracy and 37% increase in throughput on eight processors.

Akbar Siami Namin, Rattikorn Hewett, Keith S. Jones et al.

The Internet enables users to access vast resources, but it can also expose users to harmful cyber-attacks. This paper investigates human factors issues concerning the use of sounds in a cyber-security domain. It describes a methodology, referred to as sonification, to effectively design and develop auditory cyber-security threat indicators to warn users about cyber-attacks. A case study is presented, along with the results, of various types of usability testing with a number of Internet users who are visually impaired. The paper concludes with a discussion of future steps to enhance this work.