Please scroll down for article-it is on subsequent pagesINFORMS is the largest professional society in the world for professionals in the fields of operations research, management science, and analytics. For more information on INFORMS, its publications, membership, or meetings visit http://www.informs.org INFORMS 2012 c 2012 INFORMS | isbn 978-0-9843378-3-5 http://dx.Abstract The pervasive use of social media has generated unprecedented amounts of social data. Social media provides easily an accessible platform for users to share information. Mining social media has its potential to extract actionable patterns that can be beneficial for business, users, and consumers. Social media data are vast, noisy, unstructured, and dynamic in nature, and thus novel challenges arise. This tutorial reviews the basics of data mining and social media, introduces representative research problems of mining social media, illustrates the application of data mining to social media using examples, and describes some projects of mining social media for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief for real-world applications.

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Academic literature on machine learning modeling fails to address how to make machine learning models work for enterprises. For example, existing machine learning processes cannot address how to define business use cases for an AI application, how to convert business requirements from offering managers into data requirements for data scientists, and how to continuously improve AI applications in term of accuracy and fairness, how to customize general purpose machine learning models with industry, domain, and use case specific data to make them more accurate for specific situations etc. Making AI work for enterprises requires special considerations, tools, methods and processes. In this paper we present a maturity framework for machine learning model lifecycle management for enterprises. Our framework is a re-interpretation of the software Capability Maturity Model (CMM) for machine learning model development process. We present a set of best practices from authors' personal experience of building large scale real-world machine learning models to help organizations achieve higher levels of maturity independent of their starting point.

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In recent years, social media sites have provided a large amount of information. Recipients of such information need mechanisms to know more about the received information, including the provenance. Previous research has shown that some attributes related to the received information provide additional context, so that a recipient can assess the amount of value, trust, and validity to be placed in the received information. Personal attributes of a user, including name, location, education, ethnicity, gender, and political and religious affiliations, can be found in social media sites. In this paper, we present a novel web-based tool for collecting the attributes of interest associated with a particular social media user related to the received information. This tool provides a way to combine different attributes available at different social media sites into a single user profile. Using different types of Twitter users, we also evaluate the performance of the tool in terms of number of attribute values collected, validity of these values, and total amount of retrieval time.

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Social media propagates breaking news and disinformation alike fast and on an unsurpassed scale. Because of its democratizing nature, social media users can easily produce, receive, and propagate a piece of information without necessarily providing traceable information. Thus, there is no means for a user to verify the provenance (aka sources or originators) of information. The disinformation can cause tragic consequences to society and individuals. This work aims to take advantage of characteristics of social media to provide a solution to the problem of lacking traceable information. Such knowledge can provide additional context to the received information so that a user can assess how much value, trust, and validity should be placed on it. In this paper, we are studying a novel research problem that facilitates the seeking of the provenance of information for a few known recipients (less than 1% of the total recipients) by recovering the paths it has taken from its originators. The proposed methodology exploits easily computable node centralities of a large social media network. The experimental results with Facebook and Twitter datasets show that the proposed mechanism is effective in correctly identifying the additional recipients and seeking the provenance of information.

Privacy and security are major concerns for many users of social media. When users share information (e.g., data and photos) with friends, they can make their friends vulnerable to security and privacy breaches with dire consequences. With the continuous expansion of a user’s social network, privacy settings alone are often inadequate to protect a user’s profile. In this research, we aim to address some critical issues related to privacy protection: (1) How can we measure and assess individual users’ vulnerability? (2) With the diversity of one’s social network friends, how can one figure out an effective approach to maintaining balance between vulnerability and social utility? In this work, first we present a novel way to define vulnerable friends from an individual user’s perspective. User vulnerability is dependent on whether or not the user’s friends’ privacy settings protect the friend and the individual’s network of friends (which includes the user). We show that it is feasible to measure and assess user vulnerability and reduce one’s vulnerability without changing the structure of a social networking site. The approach is to unfriend one’s most vulnerable friends. However, when such a vulnerable friend is also socially important, unfriending him or her would significantly reduce one’s own social status. We formulate this novel problem as vulnerability minimization with social utility constraints. We formally define the optimization problem and provide an approximation algorithm with a proven bound. Finally, we conduct a large-scale evaluation of a new framework using a Facebook dataset. We resort to experiments and observe how much vulnerability an individual user can be decreased by unfriending a vulnerable friend. We compare performance of different unfriending strategies and discuss the security risk of new friend requests. Additionally, by employing different forms of social utility, we confirm that the balance between user vulnerability and social utility can be practically achieved.