[ENG]
The unprecedented growth in social media use and large-scale information collection pose new threats, but also offer new opportunities. Modeling and managing complex interactive systems requires the analysis of social and technological signals to gain new insights into human society and individual behavior. Online social networks play an essential role in our access to information and are a good proxy for studying population-level behavior patterns and individual-level predictions. In this talk, I will present my research analyzing various account behaviors, from social bots spreading misinformation to coordinated activities during political campaigns and elections. I will also present the dataset we collected and the system we developed for the #Secim2023 project, which we used to study the recent Turkish presidential elections. I will also briefly discuss the other projects we are doing in the VRL lab.
[ESP]
El crecimiento sin precedentes en el uso de redes sociales y la recolección de información a gran escala plantean nuevas amenazas, pero también ofrecen nuevas oportunidades. Modelar y gestionar sistemas interactivos complejos requiere el análisis de señales sociales y tecnológicas para obtener nuevas perspectivas sobre la sociedad humana y el comportamiento individual. Las redes sociales en línea desempeñan un papel esencial en nuestro acceso a la información y son un buen proxy para estudiar patrones de comportamiento a nivel de población y predicciones a nivel individual. En esta charla, presentaré mi investigación analizando varios comportamientos de cuentas, desde bots sociales que difunden desinformación hasta actividades coordinadas durante campañas políticas y elecciones. También presentaré el conjunto de datos que recopilamos y el sistema que desarrollamos para el proyecto #Secim2023, que utilizamos para estudiar las recientes elecciones presidenciales turcas. También discutiré brevemente los otros proyectos que estamos realizando en el laboratorio VRL. (Traducido por ChatGPT).
Dr. Onur Varol is an Assistant Professor at the Sabanci University Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences and Principal Investigator at the VIRAL Lab. His research focuses on developing techniques to analyze online behaviors to improve individual well-being and address societal problems using online data. He is awarded by The Turkish Science Academy to Young Scientist Awards (2022) and Research Incentive Award by METU Parlar Foundation (2023). He also received TUBITAK 2247-D National Leader Researcher Grant in 2022. Prior to joining Sabanci University, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University at the Center for Complex Network Research. He completed his PhD in Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington (USA). His thesis focuses on the analysis of manipulation and threats on social media and he was awarded the 2018 University Distinguished Ph.D. Dissertation Award. He has developed a system called Botometer to detect social bots on Twitter and his team ranked top 3 worldwide at the 2015 DARPA Bot Detection Challenge. His research published in prestigious venues such as International Conference of Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Nature Communications, Nature Human Behavior,World Wide Web (WWW) conference, and Communications of the ACM.