Proceedings of The7thannualisc Graduate Research Symposium

Proceedings of the7thAnnualISC Graduate Research Symposium

ISC-GRS2013

April24, 2013, Rolla, Missouri

Sai Preethi Vishwanathan

Department of Computer Science

Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, MO 65409

LogCHECK: An APi to detect cyber bullying

Abstract

In the recent years, with the advent of high-speed internet and cell phone access, a proportion of teenagers took bullying from school hallways to cyberspace. Technology greatly benefits anyone by allowing immediate access to information. On the contrary, it is the same technology that allows the wrongdoers to exploit the innocent, commit crimes and used as a weapon to harass and stalk people. Therefore parents and caretakers should take up the responsibility to help their kids to stay safe online. Many researchers analyzed the prevalence of cyber bullying, it’s social and psychological effects on the minds of childrenand also provided ways to teach youngsters about the importance of healthy communication. But only a handful considered technology as a tool to detect and help teenagers from cyber bullying. In this paper, we proposed a dashboard like interface for parents to detect cyber bullying in the early stages and help their kids to psychologically tackle the problems that arise from a particular situation.

Keywords - cyberbullying, API, interface, Mobile application, intervention & detection

INTRODUCTION

Since the nineties, bullying and violence is in the focus of public attention and there has been a growing awareness on the problem. According to one widespread definition,a person is 'being bullied or victimized when he or she is exposed repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of one or more persons'. It also involves an imbalance of power, where the victim has difficulty defending him/ her. Bullying can be either direct or indirect. While direct bullying involves physical contact with the victim and can be detected easily, indirect bullying like social isolation,

intentional exclusion is imperceptible and usually more difficult to detect.

In the recent years, apart from the traditional forms of bullying and violence, a new form of bullying emerged and is named cyber bullying. According to the National Crime Prevention Council, cyber bullying can be defined as: “when the Internet, cell phones or similar electronic devices are used to send or post text or images intended to hurt or embarrass any other person” [1] .In this new form of bullying one makes use of mediums such as mobile phones, websites, emails, instant messaging, text messages, and blogs.

Quantifying the use of technology, a recent study published that 93% of teenagers have a computer or access to one at home and 78% of them have a cell phone, 95% of teens use the internet [3]. With such a proliferated use of technology, many tragic incidents of bullying have been escalated. A survey reports [4, 5, 6] that 70% of the students experience frequent cyber bullying by using computers and smart phones to send rumors or post obscene messages. Of all the existing technologies, the usage of cell phones by 87% of teenagers makes it the most common medium for cyber bullying

[figure 1].

Bullying by physical intimidation has been a difficult problem among teenagers for a long time. Despite the fact that there might not be any physical harm, cyber bullying leaves deep emotional scars on the victim. When compared to traditional forms of bullying, cyber bullying is considered to be more persistent. It stretches far beyond the boundaries of school or workplace. To begin with, cyber bullying gives a crime doer an unfair advantage to embarrass or hurt a victim before an entire community, especially in the social networking websites. Furthermore, cyber bullying can be done anonymously, which can take place at any time and considered to be hard to trace.

Figure 1: Teens use of technology

Cyber bullying will have extremely negative impact among teenagers. Nancy Willard, author of Cyber bullying and Cyber threats: Responding to the Challenge of Online Social Aggression, Threats, and Distress, indicates that the effects of cyber bullying may be more harmful. Victims of cyber bullying can experience symptoms of depression including sadness, loneliness, insecurity, poor self-esteem, and academic decline. The feeling of not belonging and suicidal thoughts behavior can also be an aftereffect.

A disturbing statistic reveals that only 5 % of the children who attend middle-school actually told their parents when they were the victims of cyber bullying [5, 8] and only 15% of the parents polled knew what cyber bullying exactly was. Therefore there exists an extreme necessity to detect cyber bullying in early stages. Parents, family and friends should take up the responsibility to help kids to psychologically tackle the situation.

Related Effort

Extensive research has been carried out to uncover the prevalence of cyber bullying; its social and psychological effects on victims, and consequences of the cyber bullying. But relatively very few researchers thrived to mitigate the cause behind it.

Out of the many applications available in the market, very few applications have made an effort to concentrate the bullying problem directly with software-based solutions. One such project is The FearNot project [9].This project has studied the use of virtual learning environments to teach children coping strategies for bullying based on faux characters. The developers used virtual characters to play the roles of perpetrator, victim, and parent in the cyber bullying process. By introducing interactive storytelling with animated on-screen characters where the user gets to play one of the roles in the bullying scenario, this application tried to instill children with self-confidence. Even though the user is educated about the situations, they are artificially constructed and are not part of their real lives. For that reason, it suffers from the drawback that it cannot be applied in real life situations.

When a mobile application called LogCheck was proposed to be developed, the sole idea behind it was the widespread availability of smartphones among teenagers.(fig 1) As much as 75% of teenagers have cell phones and out of 54% of those who text daily , 26% have been harassed through their cellphone by voice call or text message besides sexting which is not a form of harassment in some states , however if images are shared, the action can lead to harassment and bullying.

LogCheck facilitates parents to actively monitor the huge amount of mobile phone-based ‘texting’ communications that occur outside of the scope of social media networking and allow parents to handle decisively with acts of cyber bullying the instant they are detected.

One approach that parents can exploit is filtering or blocking software to restrict teenagers from accessing social networking Web sites.The disadvantage with blocking software is that teenagers in due course will find a technique to outwit the blockingsoftware. Unlike typical web filtering systems that block content, LogCheck assists parents to check if kids are subjected to harassment or not.

With the intention to know what specific aspects of the aesthetics of the software and the kind of charts or graphs should be improved and also in order to give the end user the right cues for credibility and to ensure comprehensibility, we have explored many possible applications that focused on user experience and graphs.

LogCheck illustrates message logs in the form of methodical charts and graphs[figure 2]. Complicated information like chat logs are difficult to understand and needs an illustration. Graphs or charts can help one to understand things visually and interpret then easily in less amount of time.

With the aim of providing a highly effective, easy-to-use solution to monitor and guard kids against the dangers of the mobile world, partnering with mobile carrier companies or mobile internet platform provider is an appropriate solution. Mobile carrier companies are expected to capture relevant communication, redirecting it for inspection if any calls or text messages that indicate harassment, stalking, or hate are observed

As a mobile carrier or mobile internet platform provider, when partnered with the proposed approach, carrier companies can benefit from increased business opportunities and an enhanced image as a socially responsible company, while giving a highly effective,easy-to-use solution with which to monitor and guard their families against the dangers of the mobile world.

Figure 2 : Visual Representation of messages

Logcheck is a software based solution composed of following components(figure 3)

LogCheckAPI: It is dashboard like interface where parents view reports about their child’s online chat activity, and review suspect content.
LogCheck Inspector : Text messages transmitted via mobile devices are analyzed once inappropriate texting activity is detected
Carrier Server: It deploys LogCheck Inspector that controls capturing of relevant communication, redirecting it for inspection

The first step is to installLogCheck mobile application. So asto access functional system one has to authenticatewith credentials set by carrier service provider.Understanding parents do not have the time to go through all of the recorded chat activity, we display top 5 summary of all of the recorded text activity for an in-depth, yet quick and easy overview of the most common persons their child chat with.

Figure 3: Components

LogCheckcolloborated with mobile career services provides network based solution allowing adults to save messages as evidence and identify bully by tracking through an internet service provider or cell phone carrier.

To obtain the data for this proof-of-concept, we have generated chat messages in Google Chat which is available to any one that uses Gmail. We then downloaded the messages to my computer (in a text format) and wrote a Python script to parse the chat messages to produce a CSV file that can easily be parsed. The CSV files contains entries that correspond to a single message containing the fieldsFrom,To,Date/Time, andMessage.

With Scheme proposed, LogCheckprovides real-time solution for online child safety adapted to providers of mobile services. Parents can now take an active part in their children’s online life and rest assured that they a

re being protected from the dangers of the mobile world.

3.conclusions

With the proposed mobile application, our objective is not to a attain 100 % confidence in detecting cyber bullying but to decrease the odds of its happening. LogCheck likes to avoid directly accusing an individual of being a bully in any circumstances. If a pattern is recurring over time, or if it seems to be increasing and has a consistently negative tone, our confidence in detecting a potential threat might increase.

4.Future Work

We concede that the best assessment of this application can be made if we :

Design intervention interface by exploring set of reflective user-interaction paradigms with the goal of promoting empathy for all participants (perpetrator, the victim, friends, family, and teachers ) in the cyber bullying practice.
Introducing Action Delays that isalerting the end-user that their input might be hurtful and making them wait their comment before actually submitting could also be helpful.

We are currently in the process of developing our work of updating dictionary of abusive words, given the propensity for youth to constantly update language by the use of new words ,phrases and alterations to the meaning of existing words and phrases,on the site for a real-world, in-situ evaluation and remain excited about the practical nature of the research questions that this work has produced.

5.Acknowledgments

We wish to thank all the people involved in this research project We wish to acknowledge the support and cooperation extended to us by intelligent system center, Missouri University of Science and technology.

6.References

[1]Olweus Bullying prevention program,available at

[2]cyberbullying, The National Crime Prevention, available at

[3]Lenhart, Arafeh, Smith, Rankin Macgill, 2008; USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future, 2005

[4]Reportsavailable

[5]Stopcyberbullyingavailableat

[6]Internetsafety101availableat

[7]Endcyberbuyllingavailable

[8]Data based on 2005-06 iSafe survey of 13,000 students in grades 5 to 12.

[9]Information available at

[10]Information available at