The document outlines the research themes and projects of Dr. Derek Doran's web and complex systems lab, focusing on complex systems analysis and control, particularly in web systems and emerging domains. Key areas of interest include the implications of IoT traffic on web optimization, military geospatial data analysis, and online emotional support systems, along with a variety of collaborative projects. The lab receives funding from various sources, including the NSF, and engages in both theoretical and practical research with multiple collaborators.

1. Web and Complex
Systems Lab
Dr. Derek Doran
August 2015
http://knoesis.wright.edu/doran

2. Lab Summary
Theme: Investigating both theoretical and practical aspects of
complex systems analysis and control.
Emphasis: Quantitative and structural modeling, Web systems,
modeling complexity in emerging domains
Areas of interest:
- Social Informatics
- Systems Optimization
- Network Science Theory
Students: 3 full-time GRAs; 1 UGRA, 1 summer researcher
Funding: From NSF, I/UCRC, SocInfo Startup, Internal WSU Competition
Collaborations: Bell Labs, AFRL, WSU Depts. of ICCSM and Professional Psych.,
7 Cups of Tea Inc., Univ. of Pavia

3. Understanding and Mitigating Web Robot
(IoT) Traffic on Web Systems
 Preparing for the IoT future (present)
 2012: 60% of http traffic on the Web driven by a machine
rather than a human
 We are approaching an age where most devices will be
always online — the 60% proportion will only get higher
 Yet Web and cloud platform optimizations rely on statistical
patterns seen only in human driven traffic
 Result: Band-aid solutions… we provision bigger clouds, faster
servers, more energy…
Funding: NSF CSR [CRII award winner]

4. Understanding robot traffic, and building new optimizations for
servers and clouds, may drastically improve their efficiency
and decrease their energy footprint
• IoT Traffic Detection
• Traffic classification and characterization
• Statistical Analysis
• Synthetic traffic generation
• IoT demand modeling
• New System Optimizations
• Robot-resilient predictive Web
caching
Research Tasks
Funding: NSF CSR [CRII award winner]

5. Wide Area Geospatial Awareness
• Military aerial sensors capture images of large (4km
x 4km) regions. Resolution beats ImageBox, etc.
• SOTA uses images to keep an eye on an individual.
Uses a pittance of the data in an image.
• Our focus - Use all the data to model the dynamics
in a region over time
• Operations on a temporal network representation
of image sequences reveal macro-level
characteristics
• Streaming data to temporal network: A major
network science theory question to be tackled
Funding: NSF I/UCRC CSR

6. Online Emotional Support Systems
• Web has always been used as a medium to find and connect to those
offering emotional support. Now new social technologies are radically
redefining this process.
• We investigate the world’s largest social network (> 100k users)
designed only to connect those needing help with a
crowd of others offering free, one-on-one support
• A new paradigm: can effective emotional support be
delivered by a literal army of paraprofessionals?
Can we outsource some aspects of clinical psychology?
• Full study published @ ACM/IEEE ASONAM 2015
(Premiere conference on computational social network analysis and mining)

7. Other Projects
• Kno.e.sis collaborations: PSN, social data
recommendation, user interest modeling
• Mobile phone data analytics for social good
• Customer analytics for online social services
• Social role theory and mining in large social systems
• Interdisciplinary data science curriculum development