When Professor Kathleen Carley of Carnegie Mellon University agreed to talk with us about network analysis and its impact on insider risks, we scooched our chairs a little closer to our screens and leaned right in. In this episode of Uncovering Hidden Risks, Liz Willets and Christophe Fiessinger get schooled by Professor Carley about the history of Network Analysis and how social and dynamic networks affect the way that people interact with each other, exchange information and even manage social discord. 0:00 Welcome and recap of 1:30 Meet our guest: Kathleen Carley, Professor at Carnegie Mellon University; Director of Computational Analysis & Social and Organizational Systems; and Director of Ideas for Informed Democracy and Social Cybersecurity 3:00 Setting the story: Understanding Network Analysis and its impact on company silos, insider threats, counter terrorism and social media. 5:00 The science of social networks: how formal and informal relationships contribute to the spread of information and insider risks 7:00 The influence of dynamic networks: how locations, people and beliefs impact behavior and shape predictive analytics 13:30 Feelings vs Facts: Using sentiment analysis to identify positive or negative sentiments via text 19:41 Calming the crowd: How social networks and secondary actors can stave off social unrest 22:00 Building a sentiment model from scratch: understanding the challenges and ethics of identifying offensive language and insider threats 26:00 Getting granular: how to differentiate between more subtle sentiments such as anger, disgust and disappointment 28:15 Staying Relevant: the challenge of building training sets and ML models that stay current with social and language trends. Liz Willets: Well, hi, everyone. Uh, welcome back to our podcast series Uncovering Hidden Risks, um, our podcast where we uncover insights from the latest trends, um, in the news and in research through conversations with some of the experts in the insider risk space. Um, so, my name's Liz Willets, and I'm here with my cohost, Christophe Fiessinger, to dis- just discuss and deep dive on some interesting topics. Um, so, Christophe, can you believe we're already on Episode 3? (laughs) Christophe Fiessinger: No, and so much to talk about, and I'm just super excited about this episode today and, and our guest. Liz Willets: Awesome. Yeah, no. I'm super excited. Um, quickly though, let's recap last week. Um, you know, we spoke with Christian Rudnick. He's from our Data Science, um, and Research team at Microsoft and really got his perspective, uh, a little bit more on the machining learning side of things. Um, so, you know, we talked about all the various signals, languages, um, content types, whether that's image, text that we're really using ML to intelligently detect inappropriate communications. You know, we talked about how the keyword and lexicon approach just won't cut it, um, and, and kind of the value of machine learning there. Um, and then, ultimately, you know, just how to get a signal out of all of the noise, um, so super interesting, um, topic. And I think today, we're gonna kind of change gears a bit. I'm really excited to have Kathleen Carley here. Uh, she's a professor across many disciplines at Carnigen Melligan, Carnegie Mellon University, um, you know, focused with your research around network analysis and computational social theory. Um, so, so, welcome, uh, Kathleen. Uh, we're super excited to have you here and, and would love to just hear a little bit about your background and really how you got into this space. Professor Kathleen Carley: So, um, hello, Liz and Christophe, and I'm, I'm really thrilled to be here and excited to talk to you. So, I'm a professor at Carnegie Mellon, and I'm also the director there of two different, uh, centers. One is Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems, which is, you know, it brings computer science and social science together to look at everything from terrorism to insider threat to how to design your next organization. And then, I'm also the director of a new center that we just set up called IDeaS for Informed Democracy and Social Cybersecurity, which is all about disinformation, uh, hate speech, and extremism online. Liz Willets: Wow. Professor Kathleen Carley: Awesome. Liz Willets: Sounds like you're (laughs) definitely gonna run the gamut over there (laughs) at, uh, CMU. Um, that's great to hear and definitely would love, um, especially for the listeners and even for my own edification to kinda double-click on that network analysis piece, um, and l- learn a little bit more about what that is and kind of how it's developed over the past, um, couple years. Professor Kathleen Carley: So, network analysis is the scientific field that actually started before World War II, and it's all about connecting things. And it's the idea that when you have a set of things, the way ...
