Shazia Tabassum

Abstract
Waste transport management is a critical sector where maintaining accurate records and preventing fraudulent or illegal activities is essential for regulatory compliance, environmental protection, and public safety. However, monitoring and analyzing large-scale waste transport records to identify suspicious patterns or anomalies is a complex task. These records often involve multiple entities and exhibit variability in waste flows between them. Traditional anomaly detection methods relying solely on individual transaction data, may struggle to capture the deeper, network-level anomalies that emerge from the interactions between entities. To address this complexity, we propose a hybrid approach that integrates network-based measures with machine learning techniques for anomaly detection in waste transport data. Our method leverages advanced graph analysis techniques, such as sub-graph detection, community structure analysis, and centrality measures, to extract meaningful features that describe the network’s topology. We also introduce novel metrics for edge weight disparities. Further, advanced machine learning techniques, including clustering, neural network, density-based, and ensemble methods are applied to these structural features to enhance and refine the identification of anomalous behaviors. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.

Abstract
Influence Analysis is one of the well-known areas of Social Network Analysis. However, discovering influencers from micro-blog networks based on topics has gained recent popularity due to its specificity. Besides, these data networks are massive, continuous and evolving. Therefore, to address the above challenges we propose a dynamic framework for topic modelling and identifying influencers in the same process. It incorporates dynamic sampling, community detection and network statistics over graph data stream from a social media activity management application. Further, we compare the graph measures against each other empirically and observe that there is no evidence of correlation between the sets of users having large number of friends and the users whose posts achieve high acceptance (i.e., highly liked, commented and shared posts). Therefore, we propose a novel approach that incorporates a user's reachability and also acceptability by other users. Consequently, we improve on graph metrics by including a dynamic acceptance score (integrating content quality with network structure) for ranking influencers in micro-blogs. Additionally, we analysed the topic clusters' structure and quality with empirical experiments and visualization.

Abstract
Topic modeling or inference has been one of the well-known problems in the area of text mining. It deals with the automatic categorisation of words or documents into similarity groups also known as topics. In most of the social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, hashtags are used to define the content of posts. Therefore, modelling of hashtags helps in categorising posts as well as analysing user preferences. In this work, we tried to address this problem involving hashtags that stream in real-time. Our approach encompasses graph of hashtags, dynamic sampling and modularity based community detection over the data from a popular social media engagement application. Further, we analysed the topic clusters' structure and quality using empirical experiments. The results unveil latent semantic relations between hashtags and also show frequent hashtags in a cluster. Moreover, in this approach, the words in different languages are treated synonymously. Besides, we also observed top trending topics and correlated clusters.

Abstract
Nuisance or unsolicited calls and instant messages come at any time in a variety of different ways. These calls would not only exasperate recipients with the unwanted ringing, impacting their productivity, but also lead to a direct financial loss to users and service providers. Telecommunication Service Providers (TSPs) often employ standalone detection systems to classify call originators as spammers or non-spammers using their behavioral patterns. These approaches perform well when spammers target a large number of recipients of one service provider. However, professional spammers try to evade the standalone systems by intelligently reducing the number of spam calls sent to one service provider, and instead distribute calls to the recipients of many service providers. Naturally, collaboration among service providers could provide an effective defense, but it brings the challenge of privacy protection and system resources required for the collaboration process. In this paper, we propose a novel decentralized collaborative system named privy for the effective blocking of spammers who target multiple TSPs. More specifically, we develop a system that aggregates the feedback scores reported by the collaborating TSPs without employing any trusted third party system, while preserving the privacy of users and collaborators. We evaluate the system performance of privy using both the synthetic and real call detail records. We find that privy can correctly block spammers in a quicker time, as compared to standalone systems. Further, we also analyze the security and privacy properties of the privy system under different adversarial models.

Abstract
The link prediction task has found numerous applications in real-world scenarios. However, in most of the cases like interactions, purchases, mobility, etc., links can re-occur again and again across time. As a result, the data being generated is excessively large to handle, associated with the complexity and sparsity of networks. Therefore, we propose a very fast, memory-less, and dynamic sampling-based method for predicting recurring links for a successive future point in time. This method works by biasing the links exponentially based on their time of occurrence, frequency, and stability. To evaluate the efficiency of our method, we carried out rigorous experiments with massive real-world graph streams. Our empirical results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art method for recurring links prediction. Additionally, we also empirically analyzed the evolution of links with the perspective of multi-graph topology and their recurrence probability over time.