BackgroundTextual information is one of the most significant portions of data that users generate by participating in different online activities such as leaving online reviews and posting tweets. On one hand, textual data consists of abundant information about users’ behavior, preferences, and needs which is critical for understanding them. For...

Background The overturning of the Internet Privacy Rules by the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC) in late March 2017 allows Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to collect, share and sell their customers’ web browsing data without their consent. With third-party trackers embedded in webpages, this ruling places privacy under further risk....

Background Tremendous volumes of sequential event data continue to be generated across diverse technological domains. Whether they be “retweets” sprouting across the social media network Twitter, stock trades, or ride-share vehicle usage patterns, effective data processing of past occurrences can improve near-term predictability of future...

In social media, the term “viral” refers to when a piece of information (microblog, photograph, video, link, etc.) starts to spread in a social network and increases in popularity by an order-of-magnitude. Much work is currently being done to better understand the patterns and implications of this new phenomenon. Previous studies have devised...