Shreya Jain received her MS-Dual Degree in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE)
Her research work was supervised by Dr. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru and thesis reviewed by Dr. Manish Shrivastava and Prof. Kamakshi Prasad, JNTUH.
Here’s a summary of Shreya’s M.S thesis, Characterizing and Detecting Livestreaming Chatbots as explained by her:
Livestreaming platforms enable content producers or streamers to broadcast creative content to a poten- tially large viewer base. Chatrooms form an integral part of such platforms, enabling viewers to interact both with streamer and amongst themselves. Streams with high engagement (many viewers and high active chatters) are typically considered engaging and often promoted to end users by means of recommendation algorithms, and exposed to better monetization opportunities via revenue share from platform advertising, viewer donations and third-party sponsorships. Given such incentives, some streamers make use of fraudulent means to increase perceived engagement by simulating chatter via fake “chatbots” which can be purchased from online marketplaces. This inorganic engagement can negatively influence recommendations, hurt streamer and viewer trust in the platform, and harm monetization for honest streamers. In this study, we tackle the novel problem of automating detection of chatbots on livestreaming platforms. To this end, we first formalize the livestreaming chatbot detection problem and characterize differences between botted and genuine chatter behaviour observed from a real-world livestreaming chatter dataset collected from Twitch.tv by proposing SHERLOCK and BOTHUNT methods. This work is a timely contribution to the area of computer science specially combating astroturfing, needed to mitigate the spread of fraudulent bot users on Live streaming Platforms.