Date: October 12

Time: 10-11 am

Location: KACB 2456

Title: Psychological Features and their Impacts on Cyberbullying Detection

Speaker: Vimala Balakrishnan

Abstract: With the emergence of social networking sites, certain people are finding illegal and unethical ways to use these online communities as means for inappropriate online activities, such as cyberbullying. In this study, we deal with cyberbullying detection mechanism based on the user’s personality, determined using the Big Five and Dark Triad models, sentiment and emotion. The proposed model aims at the recognition of bullying patterns among the Twitter communities. Random Forest. J48 and Naïve Bayes were used for cyberbullying classification (i.e. aggressor, spammer, bully and normal), using a baseline algorithm encompassing Twitter-based features. Findings indicate the model performed the best when user’s personality and sentiments were used. Emotion however did not have any impact on cyberbullying detection. The best overall detection results were observed when specific key traits were used (i.e. identified through the Dimension Reduction algorithm). Comparing the three machine-learning algorithms, J48 emerged to be the best producing an accuracy of 93%.

Biography: Dr Vimala Balakrishnan is a Senior Lecturer, and Data Scientist affiliated with the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya. She obtained her PhD. in the field of Ergonomics from Multimedia University, and her Master and Bachelor degrees from University of Science Malaysia. Dr Balakrishnan's main research interests are in data analytics and sentiment analysis, particularly related to social media. Her research domains include healthcare, education and social issues such as cyberbullying. She has published approximately 45 articles in top indexed journals, and also serves as an Associate Editor to the Malaysian Journal of Computer Science, and as an Associate Member for the Global Science and Technology Forum. She is also a fellow for the Leadership in Innovation 2017 program (Royal Academy of Engineering, UK). She is currently serving as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Georgia, USA.