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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
With human interactions with the Internet ever increasing, an active area of multi-disciplinary research today is Cyber-Psychology – which explores the “thinking, behavior and attitudes of the person using the computer”. While there are many existing studies in this realm, they all collect Internet usage data via self-reported surveys only that have constraints arising from human memory limitations, self reporting biases and inability to capture high dimensional/ high volume Internet usage data. In this talk, I will present findings on our experiments conducted at Missouri University of Science and Technology on assessing human behavior from Internet usage using real Internet data collected continuously, unobtrusively and preserving privacy from campus networks with college students as subjects. We demonstrate how ‘big’ Internet usage data when processed and categorized appropriately can provide significant insights on human behavior including depressive symptoms, stress, anxiety and internet addiction. Applications of our study to cyber security are immediate and will be elaborated upon in the talk.
Host: Josephine Olivas