Research directions
#Secim2023: Analysis of Turkish Presidential Elections
We share data science insights and reports from our disinformation and coordinated activity detection project on upcoming 2023 Turkish Presidential Election.
More information can be found on project website secim2023.biz
Online manipulation and automated activites
Intents and strategies of malicious entities such as social bots and orchestrated campaigns are either fully automated by software or directed by motivated human agents. Armies of social bots and misinformation campaigns are executed to promote ideas, advertise products, or sway public opinion. We have been observing social bots that attempt to persuade, influence, and deceive. My experience in the identification of social bots and early detection of campaigns helps to isolate those activities and study their strategies in-depth. I am interested in building detection systems that are evolving to lead in this arms-race by exploring behavioral signatures of users and characterizing their strategy, as well as, monitoring online communities for early identification of new threats. We aim to build models to detect coordinated behaviors and malicious entities online. This project has implication for political systems inlcuding voter behaviors, politiical unrests, and manipulation of online convesations.
Health and well-being
The brain is a mysterious organ that processes a vast amount of information surrounding us and controls essential biological processes such as regulating heart rate, temperature, and mood. Deviations from the stable patterns manifest itself as a mental health disorder or early symptoms of a disease. Sleep is one of the most essential and also the most neglected contributor to our well-being. We are currently investigating major biological and environmental information to quantify the role of sleep for our well-being. We are using digital fingerprints to model individual sleep habits along with information collected through social media to estimate mood and sensory information like heart-rate and exercise collected through quantified-self devices. We are especially interested in an individual analysis to characterize differences within the population and how certain groups react to different conditions.
Quantifying the success
Today billions of people share their experiences, ask for a recommendation, and engage with others online. My research on socio-technological systems bring opportunities to study cultural patterns, dynamics of emotions, and collective phenomena. Information collected through various services and devices tell stories in macro- and micro-scale. Macro-stories capture dynamics of cultures, social norms, and influence of real-world events. Similarly, micro-stories describe events occurred within a shorter timescale; visiting a city, reading a story, or merely experiencing an emotion. We are interested in analyzing the behaviors of individuals in various scales to learn the consequences of their actions and model processes effecting their health and well-being. We study the causal impact of our actions on online trajectories and worked on investigating how we experience emotions to capture human behavior more in detail.