BullyBlocker

Amanda Batista and Rae Kilby successfully represented our team at the 27th CyberPsychology, CyberTherapy, and Social Networking Conference (CYPSY 2024) in Tempe, Arizona. Amanda, a graduate research assistant in the BullyBlocker team, gave the symposium talk "A Mixed Methods Investigation of Social Media Use and Perceptions of Online Toxicity Among LGBTQ+ Young Adults”.

Manny Sandoval successfully represented our team at the 2024 International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM). He presented the papers "Identifying Cyberbullying Roles in Social Media" and "Evaluating LLMs Capabilities Towards Understanding Social Dynamics" in Calabria, Italy. Congratulations, Manny!

Our paper "Social identity, social media use, and mental health in adults: Investigating the mediating role of cyberbullying experiences and the moderating effects of gender and age", N. Barragan, A. Batista, D. Hall, Y. Silva, has been accepted for publication in Psychology Research and Behavior Management. Our paper will be part of the journal's collection on "Social Media and Mental Health: Exploring Their Complex Relationships".

Our papers "Identifying Cyberbullying Roles in Social Media", M. Sandoval, M. Abuhamad, P. Furman, M. Nazari, D. Hall, Y. S. Silva, and "Evaluating LLMs Capabilities Towards Understanding Social Dynamics", A. Tahir, L. Cheng, M. Sandoval, Y. N. Silva, D. Hall, H. Liu, have been accepted in the 2024 International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) (Multidisciplinary Track). We look forward to sharing the results of this work in Italy later this year!

Our paper "Detecting LGBTQ+ Instances of Cyberbullying", M. Arslan, M. Sandoval, M. Abuhamad, D. Hall, Y. S. Silva, has been accepted in the 2024 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (SBP-BRiMS) (Online Proceedings). We look forward to sharing the initial results of this sub-project in Pittsburgh later this year!

Congrats to Amanda Batista, who gave a symposium talk on our ongoing subproject, "A Mixed Methods Investigation of Social Media Use and Perceptions of Online Toxicity Among LGBTQ+ Young Adults" at the 2024 Resilience in Social Environments Conference at ASU.

Maddy Juarez and Manny Sandoval successfully represented our team at recent LUC symposia. Manuel presented the poster "Cyberbullying Role Detection Using LLMs" at the Graduate School's 17th Annual Interdisciplinary Symposium (April 13) and Maddie presented the poster "ActionPoint: An App to Combat Cyberbullying by Strengthening Parent-Teen Relationships" at the 2024 Undergraduate Research and Engagement Symposium (April 20). Congrats to both of them!

We just received notification that the U.S Patent and Trademark Office has agreed to grant a new patent directed to our team’s work on Systems and Methods for Unsupervised Cyberbullying Detection via Time-Informed Gaussian Mixture Model (U.S. patent number: 11,916,866). Congrats to everyone involved in this effort, particularly to Lu Cheng for leading this submission!

Amanda Batista did a great job representing our team and presenting the research poster "A Mixed Methods Investigation of Social Media Use and Perceptions of Online Toxicity Among LGBTQ+ Young Adults" at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality & Social Psychology (SPSP).

Our research paper "'ActionPoint: An App to Combat Cyberbullying by Strengthening Parent-Teen Relationships" co-authored by M. Juarez, N. Barragan, D. Hall, G. Thiruvathukal, and Y. Silva was accepted at the 2024 IEEE World Forum on Public Safety Technology (WF-PST). We look forward to sharing the results of this work in Washington DC later this year!

Several members of our research team participated in the latest edition of Speak Stand Save 2024 (Phoenix AZ) where hundreds of middle school students gathered to learn about various tools to combat cyberbullying. Our team’s presentation (Cyberbullying, social media, and mental health: Improving outcomes for parents and teens) focused on highlighting how our ActionPoint app can be an effective resource for parents and teens to develop better communication skills. Our participation in this event was highlighted in a recent LUC CAS News article.

We are happy to announce the launch of the ActionPoint App, a cutting-edge application designed to combat bullying through the strengthening of parent-teen relationships. ActionPoint is a no-cost and user-friendly app that empowers parents and teens to foster appropriate online behaviors, learn more about cyberbullying scenarios, and communicate effectively regarding social media and technology use in their everyday lives. The various app activities are supported by empirical research in the social sciences. Download the app. See the press release.

Our research paper "An Analysis of Temporal Trends in Anti-Asian Hate and Counter-Hate on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic" co-authored by B. Wheeler, S. Jung, D. Hall, M. Purohit, and Y. Silva was accepted for publication in the Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking journal.

Several members of our team presented recent results of our project at the graduate and undergraduate symposia at LUC. Monika Purohit presented the poster "Global Prevalence Patterns of Anti-Asian Prejudice on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic" at the Graduate School's Annual Interdisciplinary Symposium. Maddie Juarez and Patrick Furman presented the posters "ActionPoint App: Implementing an App to Combat Cyberbullying Through the Strengthening of Parent-Teen Relationships" and "Identifying Participant Roles in Cyberbullying Through Hierarchical Attention Networks" at the Undergraduate Research and Engagement Symposium.

Several members of the BullyBlocker team attended the ASU Day at the Capitol on April 10th. Equipped with an interactive web-based activity (Test Your Social Media IQ), posters, and flyers, the team shared our research outcomes and current developments with legislators and visitors.

Professors Yas Silva and Deborah Hall participated recently in the Talking About Kids podcast hosted by R. Bradley Snyder. Talking About Kids is a weekly podcast for parents, educators, and direct service providers that explores the latest information on issues impacting children and adolescents. In this podcast episode, professors Silva and Hall shared their perspectives on cyberbullying risks and anti-cyberbullying resources. You can listen to this episode on your favorite postcast platform!

Haojian Li represented our team and presented the research poster "Individual difference predictors of different types of cyberbystander behavior" at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality & Social Psychology (SPSP) - Psychology of Media & Technology Preconference.

Members of our team engaged on a lively activity at the ASU Open Door 2023 event. Visitors of the BullyBlocker “stop” at the event completed a Social Media IQ test and learned about social media benefits and risks as well as anti-cyberbullying tools. Thanks to everyone who visited our table!

Natali Barragan represented the BullyBlocker team and presented the research poster "Social media blues: An exploratory investigation of the variations in social media use motives and mental health across platforms" at the RISE (Resilience in Social Environments) conference at ASU.

Our paper "#WashTheHate: Understanding the Prevalence of Anti-Asian Prejudice on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic" co-authored by B. Wheeler, S. Jung, M. Barioni, M. Purohit, D. Hall, and Y. Silva received the Best Paper Award (Multidisciplinary Track) at the 2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining. Contrats team!

Our proposal "Toward Safer Online Experiences for LGBTQ+ Communities" (PI: Y. Silva, Co-PI: D. Hall), was selected to receive a Google research grant under the Award for Inclusion Research (AIR) Program ($60,000.00, Oct. 22 - Oct. 2023). You can learn more about this Google program here.

Our research paper "#WashTheHate: Understanding the Prevalence of Anti-Asian Prejudice on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic" co-authored by B. Wheeler, S. Jung, M. N. Barioni, M. Purohit, D. Hall, and Y. Silva was accepted at the 2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) We look forward to presenting the results of this work!

Congrats to Haojian Li, who was awarded the Innovations in Psychological Research (IPR) grant from the MS Psychology Program at ASU to support a study using the mock social media network tool to investigate cyberbystander behavior.

Our research paper "Bias Mitigation for Toxicity Detection via Sequential Decisions" co-authored by L. Cheng, D. Mosallanezhad, Y. Silva, D. Hall, and H. Liu was accepted at the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR). SIGIR'22 had an acceptance rate of 20% and will take place in Madrid, Spain. We look forward to sharing the latest results of the BullyBlocker project.

Our research paper "A Labeled Dataset for Investigating Cyberbullying Content Patterns in Instagram" co-authored by Mara Hamlett, Grace Powell, Yasin Silva, and Deborah Hall was accepted at the 16th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM'22). We look forward to sharing the recent resources and results of the BullyBlocker project in Atlanta, GA.

Our paper 'Harnessing the Power of Interdisciplinary Research with Psychology-Informed Cyberbullying Detection Models', co-authored by Deborah Hall, Yasin Silva, Brittany Wheeler, Lu Cheng, and Kathleen Baumel, was accepted for publication in the International Journal of Bullying Prevention, an official publication of the International Bullying Prevention Association.

Our paper 'Cyberbullying and Mental Health in Adults: The Moderating Role of Social Media Use and Gender', co-authored by Kaitlyn Schodt, Selena Quiroz, Brittany Wheeler, Deborah Hall, and Yasin Silva, was accepted for publication in Frontiers in Psychiatry (Public Mental Health section). Congratulations team!

Our paper 'Mitigating Bias in Session-based Cyberbullying Detection: A Non-Compromising Approach', co-authored by Lu Cheng, Ahmadreza Mosallanezhad, Yasin SIlva, Deborah Hall and Huan Liu, was accepted as a main conference research paper in the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2021). We look forward to presenting the results of our work!!

Our team won awards for the ISSR and NCUIRE Poster Contests this year! Johnny Hudson received second place in the Proposed Research Category for the Institute of Social Science Research Poster Contest. You can find out more about this award following this link: ISSR award website The team also won second place in the NCUIRE Student Choice Awards for their latest poster on the ActionPoint app. You can learn more about this award here: NCUIRE Symposium award website. Congratulations team!

Our team presented two posters at the NCUIRE Research Symposium this month. The first poster, 'Investigating Patterns of Anti-Asian Racism on Twitter During Covid-19', co-authored by Victor Garcia, Seong Jung, Grace Powell, Yasin Silva, Deborah Hall, and Maria Camila Nardini Barioni, examines patterns of anti-Asian racism on Twitter to shed light on data patterns applicable to data models for identifying racism online. The second poster, 'ActionPoint: Implementing an App to Combat Cyberbullying Through the Strengthening of Parent-Teen Relationships', co-authored by Maggie Lorenz, Daniel Foglesong, Victor Garcia, Giovanni Artiglio, Yasin Silva, and Deborah Hall, presents the latest implementation of the ActionPoint app. This poster won second place at the Student Choice Awards during the symposium. Congrats team! These posters can be found on the Publications & Posters page.

Our team's poster, 'Anti-Asian Prejudice on Twitter during the COVID-19 Pandemic', co-authored by Johnny Hudson, Victor Garcia, Brittany Wheeler, Maria Camila Nardini Barioni, Yasin Silva, and Deborah Hall, was presented at the Institute for Social Science Research this spring. This poster explores prejudice and discrimination against Asian populations in America since the start of the pandemic. Congratulations team! The poster can be found on the Publications & Posters page.

Our team's paper 'Modeling Temporal Patterns of Cyberbullying Detection with Hierarchical Attention Networks', co-authored by Lu Cheng, Ruocheng Guo, Yasin Silva, Deborah Hall and Huan Liu, has been accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of ACM/IMS Transactions on Data Science. This paper presents a hierarchical structure to better capture (Instagram) social media sessions and their temporal properties.

This month, our team presented at the 2020 Western Psychological Association Conference. Two of the presentations, It takes a village: Age and desire for social support predict parents’ anti-bullying app use and Child’s bullying history predicts parents’ intentions to use anti-bullying apps, explored parents' use of anti-bullying apps. They were authored by Brittany Wheeler (shown above), Kathleen Baumel (shown above), Xingyu Liu, Selena Quiroz, Deborah Hall, and Yasin Silva. The team also presented, Temporal shifts in the nature and study of cyberbullying on social media: A meta-analytic investigation, by Xingyu Liu, Selena Quiroz, Deborah Hall, and Yasin Silva. Congratulations team!

Out team's paper 'Session-based Cyberbullying Detection: Problems and Challenges', co-authored by Lu Cheng, Yasin Silva, Deborah Hall and Huan Liu, has been accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of IEEE Internet Computing. This paper explores the challenges and current solutions in the area of Cyberbullying detection.

Our proposal Interdisciplinary Models to Identify and Understand Cyberbullying (PI: Silva, Co-PIs: Hall and Liu) has received funding from the National Science Foundation under the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program. This project integrates computer science and psychology frameworks to advance our understanding of how cyberbullying can be identified and prevented. The core objective of this interdisciplinary project is to design and develop models and apps to prevent and identify instances of cyberbullying in social networks. It uses psychological theory to guide investigations of the nature of cyberbullying and the adoption of automated anti-bullying tools, as well as carefully-designed data collection processes and evaluation frameworks. You can learn more about the award following this link: NSF award website.

Hailyn Valle and Victor Garcia, two of our team’s undergraduate research assistants, received a Team NCUIRE Racial Justice Program award. This award will support their research work investigating patterns of anti-Asian racism on Twitter during Covid-19. Congratulations Hailyn and Victor!

Our paper Unsupervised Cyberbullying Detection via Time-Informed Deep Clustering, co-authored by Lu Cheng, Kai Shu, Siqi Wu, Yasin Silva, Deborah Hall, and Huan Liu, was accepted as a full research paper in the 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2020). We look forward to presenting the results of our work!

Our team's e-poster presentation, BullyBlocker: Integrating Data, Computer, and Psychological Science to Identify Cyberbullying on Social Media, got accepted for this year's Women in Statistics and Data Science Conference! This presentation was put together by Brittany Wheeler, Lu Cheng, Yasin Silva, and Deborah Hall. Congratulations team!

Our team's paper on the temporal properties of cyberbullying on Instagram just received the CyberSafety'20 best paper award! This work was supported by an NSF grant and the paper was co-authored by Aabhaas Gupta, Wenxi Yang, Divya P. Sivakumar, Yasin Silva, Deborah Hall and Maria Nardini Barioni. Go #BullyBlocker team!

The BullyBlocker team attended the ASU Day at the Capitol this month. Equipped with posters, a video, and the latest version of the BullyBlocker app, the team shared their research outcomes and current developments with legislators and visitors.

Our paper 'Temporal Properties of Cyberbullying on Instagram', co-authored by Aabhaas Gupta, Wenxi Yang, Divya P. Sivakumar, Yasin Silva, Deborah Hall and Maria Camila Nardini Barioni, was accepted in the 5th Workshop on Computational Methods in Online Misbehavior (CyberSafety '20, Taipei, Taiwan). This paper introduces a thoroughly-coded dataset that includes human labels at the comment and post level and presents key temporal characteristics of cyberbullying and trends obtained from descriptive and burst analysis tasks. CyberSafety '20 will be co-located with The Web Conference '20.

Three members of the BullyBlocker team participated in the 2019 Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Principal Investigators' Meeting (SaTC PI Meeting) in D.C. Dr. Silva and Dr. Hall presented the key results of our project and participated in an interesting discussion about data sharing and privacy requirements as part of the Social and Behavioral Aspects of Cyber Security breakout session. John Spokes was selected by the event organizers to receive travel support and attend the undergraduate track of the meeting. John did a great job presenting his poster about the ActionPoint app design.

Recent stories on 3TV/CBS5 and 12News highlighted recent efforts of the BullyBlocker team to build models and apps to identify cyberbullying instances in social media sessions. The stories include interviews with several members of our team. You can watch the stories here and here. Thank you Trisha Hendricks and Jason Barry for your reporting!

A recent article (and accompanying video) on KTAR News and Cronkite News highlighted the risks of cyberbullying in social networks and described the efforts of the BullyBlocker team to implement anti-bullying apps for parents and teens. The story specifically mentioned our efforts to implement models and tools for Instagram. The story can be found here and here. Thank you Abbagail Leon and Bayne Froney for preparing this story!

Members of the our team engaged on a lively discussion with members of the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) delegation on Cyberbullying (scholars and leaders from Eastern Europe and Central Asia). The group is part of the International Visitor Leadership Program run by the U.S. Department of State. Thank you for visiting us at ASU!

Our work on developing machine-learning-based cyberbullying detection models and our recent SIAM SDM'2019 paper 'Hierarchical Attention Networks for Cyberbullying Detection on the Instagram Social Network' were highlighted in a recent press release prepared by SIAM and made available on Education Dive’s website .

Earlier this month, Lu Cheng, a member of our team, presented the paper 'Hierarchical Attention Networks for Cyberbullying Detection on the Instagram Social Network' at the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining in Alberta, Canada. Congratulations Lu for a great presentation!

The BullyBlocker project was highlighted in a recent news article about cyberbullying on AZFamily.com and the Arizona PBS website. Featuring interviews with Dr. Yasin Silva and Dr. Deborah Hall, the article emphasizes the importance of combatting cyberbullying. The article can be found here and here.

Our paper 'PI-Bully: Personalized Cyberbullying Detection with Peer Influence', co-authored by Lu Cheng, Jundong Li, Yasin Silva, Deborah Hall and Huan Liu, was accepted to the 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2019 (acceptance rate: 17.9%)! IJCAI 2019 will take place in Macao, China in August 2019. We look forward to sharing the latest results of the BullyBlocker project at IJCAI'19.

John Spokes (pictured), Tim Strom, and Nathalie Alejandro presented the poster, ActionPoint: Action-driven App to Strengthen Parent-Teen Relationships to Combat Cyberbullying, at Arizona State University. The poster can be found on the Publications & Posters page.

Kaitlyn Schodt and Wenxi Yang presented their posters at the Society of Personal and Social Psychology in Portland, Oregon. Schodt's presentation highlighted social media's role in relation to psychological risk factors and cyberbullying victimization while Yang's presentation investigated the temporal aspects of cyberbullying on Instagram. Their posters can be found on the Publications & Posters page.

Earlier this month, Lu Cheng presented the paper 'XBully: Cyberbullying Detection within a Multi-Modal Context', co-authored with Jundong Li, Yasin Silva, Deborah Hall and Huan Liu at the ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) 2019 in Melbourne, Australia. Lu’s participation included an oral paper presentation and a poster session. Check out the Publications & Posters page to see the paper and poster!

Our paper 'Hierarchical Attention Networks for Cyberbullying Detection on the Instagram Social Network', co-authored by Lu Cheng, Ruocheng Guo, Yasin N. Silva, Deborah Hall and Huan Liu, was accepted to the (acceptance rate: 22.7%)! SDM 2019 will take place in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in May 2019. We look forward to sharing the results of our work with the SDM community.

Our team's paper 'XBully: Cyberbullying Detection within a Multi-Modal Context', co-authored by Lu Cheng, Jundong Li, Yasin Silva, Deborah Hall and Huan Liu, was accepted to the ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) 2019 (acceptance rate: 16%)! WSDM 2019 will take place in Melbourne, Australia in February 2019. We look forward to sharing the results of our work with the WSDM community.

The principal investigators of our project, Prof. Yasin Silva and Prof. Deborah Hall are finalists for the Innovator of the Year award (Academia Category) at the 2018 Governor’s Celebration of Innovation Awards (GCOI). GCOI is the Arizona Technology Council’s (AZTC) annual awards gala in partnership with the Arizona Commerce Authority (ACA) that honors technology leaders and innovators from across the state. 2018 marks the 15th year of this event.

Our team leaders, Professors Yasin Silva and Deborah Hall received the ASU New College Outstanding Innovation Award 2017-2018 for their interdisciplinary work in the BullyBlocker project. In the picture, they appear with Prof. Todd Sandrin, dean of The New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences.

The paper "BullyBlocker: Toward an Interdisciplinary Approach to Identify Cyberbullying" coauthored by Prof. Yasin Silva, Prof. Deborah Hall and Applied Computing student Christopher Rich has been accepted in the Social Network Analysis and Mining journal (SNAM). SNAM is one of the premier journals in the area of social network analysis.

A news story highlighting the BullyBlocker project recently aired on 3TV and CBS 5. The story, which includes interviews with some of our team members, describes some of the key features of the BullyBlocker app and the way these components were implemented. Watch the news story here.

Our collaborative work under the BullyBlocker project was featured in a 2017 article of ASU Now. The article delves into the merging of our work in computer science and psychology and highlights how bridging these two fields can vastly improve not only the app, but also the research that drives it. Read the story here..

We are happy to announce the public availability of the first version of the BullyBlocker app in the Apple App store. BullyBlocker 1.0 is a no-cost app designed and implemented by the BullyBlocker research group at Arizona State University. The goal of the app is to identify cyberbullying instances in social media networks by estimating the probability of a user experiencing cyberbullying. Currently, the app supports Facebook and implements an identification model based on previous psychology research findings about the nature and prevalence of cyberbullying in adolescents. BullyBlocker aims at informing parents when cyberbullying occurs and enables them to help their children in time to make a difference. Download the app. See the press release.

Our proposal EAGER: BullyBlocker – Identifying Cyberbullying in Social Networking Sites (PI: Silva, Co-PI: Hall) has received funding from the National Science Foundation under the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program.
The goal of the project is to advance the understanding of how cyberbullying, in particular, and behavioral issues, more broadly, can be effectively identified on social networking sites. The project integrates advances in computer sciences and key findings from psychological research on cyberbullying to (i) design and implement automated models for identifying cyberbullying on social networking platforms, and (ii) study usage patterns of automated tools based on these models and their utility for devising and testing new hypotheses about cyberbullying risk factors. You can learn more about the award following this link: NSF award website.

Rusty Conway and Tom Schenk, two of our team’s undergraduate research assistants, have recently received NCUIRE (New College Undergraduate Inquiry & Research Experiences) scholarship awards. These awards will support their research work in the BullyBlocker project during the 2017-2018 academic year. Congratulations Rusty and Tom!

The system demonstration paper "BullyBlocker: An App to Identify Cyberbullying in Facebook", Y.N. Silva, C. Rich, J. Chon and L.M. Tsosie, and the poster paper "BullyBlocker: Towards the Identification of Cyberbullying in Social Networking Sites", Y.N. Silva, C. Rich, and D. Hall have been accepted in the 2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2016). ASONAM is regarded as one of the premier international conferences in the area of social network analysis.

The work of Prof. Silva and Christopher Rich, one of the student researchers in our team, was highlighted in a video made by the ASU Senate for the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR). Zoom to 2:45 if you want to skip straight to this section. Watch the video here.

Christopher Rich, one of our BullyBlocker team members, has received an NCUIRE Scholarship award to work with Prof. Silva in the BullyBlocker project during the 2015-2016 academic year. NCUIRE is a New College (ASU) program that supports meaningful research collaborations between faculty and undergraduates. Congratulations to Chris and Prof. Silva!

Dr. Silva and his work in the BullyBlocker project were featured as part of the "Living our Lives Online" article in the March-2015 issue of the ASU Magazine. The article explores the perspectives of several ASU researchers about what balance means in a digital world. The PDF version of the magazine issue can be found here. The online version of the article is available here.

We recently received a research grant from the Dion Initiative for Child Well-Being and Bullying Prevention (www.dioninitiative.org). This grant will support our research work in the BullyBlocker project and will accelerate the implementation of our mobile app to identify instances of cyberbullying in Facebook. Thank you Dion Initiative!

On October 6th, Phoenix's first lady, Nicole Stanton, and ASU president, Michael Crow, united forces to kick-off a state-wide child well-being and bullying prevention effort (The Dion Initiative). This initiative represents an innovative partnership between ASU and Stop Bullying AZ to promote environments that foster the health, well-being, and academic success of children. BullyBlocker is one of the three projects supported by the Dion Initiative. The initiative will offer interdisciplinary support and funding to advance the development of the BullyBlocker app and extend its capabilities. In the pictures, the current BullyBlocker team appears with President Crow, Mayor Stanton, and the first lady, Nicole Stanton.

Our 30-day crowdfunding campaign has come to an end, and throughout those four weeks of fundraising, we’ve received outstanding media exposure through televised interviews, web-based news outlets, and social communities. Our lead researcher, Professor Yasin Silva, was interviewed by the 92.3 KTAR-FM radio station the morning of December 17th, 2013 and also made an appearance on Telemundo Arizona at 5pm that same day! The research team was also showcased on ABC 15 Arizona the morning of December 18th and was featured on CBS 5 AZ – KPHO that evening. Our funding endeavors have also been featured in an article by public relations manager, Matt Crum, published in ASU News, and our campaign was mentioned in the article covering all the research projects involved in ASU’s crowdfunding pilot as well. The State Press also published a feature article, following up on the BullyBocker campaign, in the print edition of the paper January 15th 2014.

Fox 10 - KSAZ-TV dedicated a segment of their broadcast to the BullyBlocker project on January 15th – the night of the premiere episode of American Idol and typically the night of their highest rated newscasts – showcasing the details of the progress and future goals. NBC 12, WMBF News, Hawaii News Now, Pink Shirt Day, ETCB (End to Cyberbullying) Organization, Wisconsin Teen Connection, and Campus Technology have all contributed to expanding our visibility by featuring the BullyBlocker application in a story, on their website, or on their official Facebook page.

We are so grateful that the media deems our project worthy of all the publicity we’ve received, and hope that this coverage will attract more supporters of every type as we continue implementation of BullyBlocker 1.0. We are extremely thankful for our BullyBlocker fans for joining our Facebook community, believing in this initiative, promoting the campaign with their personal network, and donating to this project. With their unfailing support and the support of our dedicated champions, we’ve collected $3,125 from both local and international supporters! With $3K, we’ll be able to purchase 3 MacBooks for our ASU undergraduate researchers to develop the BullyBlocker 1.0 app for iOS devices. While the official crowdfunding campaign has ended, the ASU Foundation has created a landing page for additional donations that may roll in. Those interested in providing continued financial support for BullyBlocker may do so online here. For future progress, campaign details, additional project photos, images of behind-the-scenes news coverage, and a compilation of contributors we’ve publicly recognized, you can follow us on our official Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/thebullyblocker.

BullyBlocker is participating in a crowdfunding program at ASU. The crowdfunding campaign will provide the project with needed resources including scholarships to support the research work of talented undergraduate students and computing resources required to complete the project. Our campaign will run from Dec. 11, 2013 to Jan. 9, 2014 and aim to raise $10K. I hope you will join in supporting this cause and sharing this information. You can find our fundraising page at https://asu.useed.net/projects/99/home.

Thanks so much for your support!

Our project has been recently accepted to be part of a crowdfunding pilot program at ASU in partnership with USEED. The goal is to raise funds from the public to support scholarships and other resources required for our project. Keep posted for updates on our campaign!

The presentation went well! Lisa had very interesting conversations and is particularly excited about the positive feedback and support she had received from several women in the industry. See our Publications & Posters page for details of the presentation.

After the article by media relations manager Matt Crum, other articles have been published in the State Press, in a blog post by an undergraduate student at ASU's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, and in the printed edition of the Navajo Times (Oct. 24, 2013). We're grateful for the positive attention, and hope it brings additional interest to our project and our purpose. We're looking forward to the conference!

An ASU News article highlighted the expected participation of undergraduate student Lisa Tsosie and the travel scholarship she was awarded. The story was featured in ASU News university and in Volume 34 of ASU's insight. It was also published in AZ Central, Your West Valley, The Navajo-Hopi Observer, and the printed edition of the Arizona Republic newspaper (Sept. 29, 2013). Be sure to keep posted for more BullyBlocker news!

Great news! Lisa's submission for the travel scholarship was accepted! Lisa and other recipients were selected from a highly competitive pool of over 900 applicants for the Google Women of Color Scholarship. This scholarship will virtually cover all of her travel expenses. Congratulations!

Our submitted abstract has just been accepted to be presented at the 2013 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference! This is the largest gathering of technical women in computing and provides great technical and professional development sessions for attendees. This year, the conference will be held in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Keep posted for more details!

We presented our current progress of our project at the ASU New College Student Expo! Our project and presentation earned us 2nd place for the School of Mathematical & Natural Sciences. Vice Provost Elizabeth Langland presented the award to Lisa at the end of the three-day expo. See our Publications & Posters page for details of the poster exhibition. For more images of the expo, you can visit the New College Blog, or follow them on instagram @asunewcollege.

We presented progress of our BullyBlocker project at the MGE@MSA/WAESO Research Presentation Opportunities Conference! This was an opportunity for the scholars, whose research was funded by the Western Alliance to Expand Student Opportunities (WAESO), to present their research projects and interact with other participating students and attend lectures about graduate/professional school opportunities. See our Publications & Posters page for more details.

Congratulations to our undergraduate student, Lisa Tsosie, for applying for and receiving the WAESO Scholarship for the Spring term of 2013. With the help of the scholarship, we'll be creating a model that exploits social media data and beginning the design phase of our initial application.