During the summer of 2019-20, while Australia suffered unprecedented bushfires across the country, false narratives regarding arson and limited backburning spread quickly on Twitter, particularly using the hashtag #ArsonEmergency. Misinformation and bot- and troll-like behaviour were detected and reported by social media researchers and the news soon reached mainstream media. This paper examines the communication and behaviour of two polarised online communities before and after news of the misinformation became public knowledge. Specifically, the Supporter community actively engaged with others to spread the hashtag, using a variety of news sources pushing the arson narrative, while the Opposer community engaged less, retweeted more, and focused its use of URLs to link to mainstream sources, debunking the narratives and exposing the anomalous behaviour. This influenced the content of the broader discussion. Bot analysis revealed the active accounts were predominantly human, but behavioural and content analysis suggests Supporters engaged in trolling, though both communities used aggressive language.
We design the insurance contract when the insurer faces arson-type risks. The optimal contract must be manipulation-proof. It is therefore continuous, it has a bounded slope, and it satisfies the no-sabotage condition when arson-type actions are free. Any contract that mixes a deductible, coinsurance and an upper limit is manipulation-proof. We also show that the ability to perform arson-type actions reduces the insured's welfare as less coverage is offered in equilibrium.
Anomaly detection in surveillance videos remains a challenging task due to the diversity of abnormal events, class imbalance, and scene-dependent visual clutter. To address these issues, we propose a robust deep learning framework that integrates human-centric preprocessing with spatio-temporal modeling for multi-class anomaly classification. Our pipeline begins by applying YOLO-World - an open-vocabulary vision-language detector - to identify human instances in raw video clips, followed by ByteTrack for consistent identity-aware tracking. Background regions outside detected bounding boxes are suppressed via Gaussian blurring, effectively reducing scene-specific distractions and focusing the model on behaviorally relevant foreground content. The refined frames are then processed by an ImageNet-pretrained InceptionV3 network for spatial feature extraction, and temporal dynamics are captured using a bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) for sequence-level classification. Evaluated on a five-class subset of the UCF-Crime dataset (Normal, Burglary, Fighting, Arson, Explosion), our method achieves a mean test accuracy of 92.41% across three independent trials, with per-class F1-scores consistentl
This paper presents a deep learning strategy to simultaneously solve Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) and back-calculate their parameters in the context of deep tunnel excavation. A Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) model is trained with synthetic data that emulates in situ displacement measurements in the host rock and at the cavity wall, obtained from extensometers and convergence monitoring. As acquiring field observations can be costly, a sequential training approach based on active learning is implemented to determine the most informative locations for new sensors. In particular, Monte Carlo dropout is used to quantify epistemic uncertainty and query measurements in regions where the model is least confident. This approach reduces the amount of required field data and optimizes sensor placement. The PINN is tested to reconstruct the displacement field around a deep tunnel of circular section excavated in transversely isotropic elastic rock and to determine rock constitutive and stress-field parameters. Results demonstrate excellent performance on small, scattered, and noisy datasets, achieving high precision for the Young's moduli, shear modulus, horizontal-to-vertic
To review the lessons learnt from recent deep geothermal case studies and plan strategically the research, development, regulation, and communication work required for the implementation of an Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS) at Cornell University, a group of engineers and scholars convened a two-day workshop on the Ithaca campus, on October 23-24, 2024. The event was funded by Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. This report is a summary of the content of the presentations and discussions that took place during the workshop. The first section focuses on philosophical, sociological, economic, and regulatory questions posed by EGS deployment as a means to mitigate climate change. The second section tackles the scientific and technological research areas associated with EGS. The third section aims to assess the feasibility of developing EGS for heat direct use at Cornell University, based on results and information available to date. The report concludes with a summary of the most salient technological and scientific breakthroughs, and a plan for future technological and academic engagement in EGS projects at Cornell.
During Australia's unprecedented bushfires in 2019-2020, misinformation blaming arson resurfaced on Twitter using #ArsonEmergency. The extent to which bots were responsible for disseminating and amplifying this misinformation has received scrutiny in the media and academic research. Here we study Twitter communities spreading this misinformation during the population-level event, and investigate the role of online communities and bots. Our in-depth investigation of the dynamics of the discussion uses a phased approach -- before and after reporting of bots promoting the hashtag was broadcast by the mainstream media. Though we did not find many bots, the most bot-like accounts were social bots, which present as genuine humans. Further, we distilled meaningful quantitative differences between two polarised communities in the Twitter discussion, resulting in the following insights. First, Supporters of the arson narrative promoted misinformation by engaging others directly with replies and mentions using hashtags and links to external sources. In response, Opposers retweeted fact-based articles and official information. Second, Supporters were embedded throughout their interaction netw
Shortly after the first COVID-19 cases became apparent in December 2020, rumors spread on social media suggesting a connection between the virus and the 5G radiation emanating from the recently deployed telecommunications network. In the course of the following weeks, this idea gained increasing popularity, and various alleged explanations for how such a connection manifests emerged. Ultimately, after being amplified by prominent conspiracy theorists, a series of arson attacks on telecommunication equipment follows, concluding with the kidnapping of telecommunication technicians in Peru. In this paper, we study the spread of content related to a conspiracy theory with harmful consequences, a so-called digital wildfire. In particular, we investigate the 5G and COVID-19 misinformation event on Twitter before, during, and after its peak in April and May 2020. For this purpose, we examine the community dynamics in complex temporal interaction networks underlying Twitter user activity. We assess the evolution of such digital wildfires by appropriately defining the temporal dynamics of communication in communities within social networks. We show that, for this specific misinformation eve
Contrary to expectations that the increased connectivity offered by the internet and particularly Online Social Networks (OSNs) would result in broad consensus on contentious issues, we instead frequently observe the formation of polarised echo chambers, in which only one side of an argument is entertained. These can progress to filter bubbles, actively filtering contrasting opinions, resulting in vulnerability to misinformation and increased polarisation on social and political issues. These have real-world effects when they spread offline, such as vaccine hesitation and violence. This work seeks to develop a better understanding of how echo chambers manifest in different discussions dealing with different issues over an extended period of time. We explore the activities of two groups of polarised accounts across three Twitter discussions in the Australian context. We found Australian Twitter accounts arguing against marriage equality in 2017 were more likely to support the notion that arsonists were the primary cause of the 2019/2020 Australian bushfires, and those supporting marriage equality argued against that arson narrative. We also found strong evidence that the stance peop
Some group with no modern descendants contributed a lot to our genomes
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Wavelength and intensity in the infrared are translated into colors in the visible