How intrusive does a life-saving user-monitoring application really need to be? While most previous research was focused on analyzing mental state of users from social media and smartphones, there is little effort towards protecting user privacy in these analyses. A challenge in analyzing user behaviors is that not only is the data multi-dimensional with a myriad of user activities but these activities occur at varying temporal rates. The overarching question of our work is: Given a set of sensitive user features, what is the minimum amount of information required to group users with similar behavior? Furthermore, does this user behavior correlate with their mental state? Towards answering those questions, our contributions are two fold: we introduce the concept of privacy surfaces that combine sensitive user data at different levels of intrusiveness. As our second contribution, we introduce MIMiS, an unsupervised privacy-aware framework that clusters users in a given privacy surface configuration to homogeneous groups with respect to their temporal signature. In addition, we explore the trade-off between intrusiveness and prediction accuracy. MIMiS employs multi-set decomposition in order to deal with incompatible temporal granularities in user activities. We extensively evaluate MIMiS on real data. Across a variety of privacy surfaces, MIMiS identified groups that are highly homogeneous with respect to self-reported mental health scores. Finally, we conduct an in-depth exploration of the discovered clusters, identifying groups whose behavior is consistent with academic deadlines.
The ubiquity of social media provides a rich opportunity to enhance the data available to mental health clinicians and researchers, enabling a better-informed and better-equipped mental health field. We present analysis of mental health phenomena in publicly available Twitter data, demonstrating how rigorous application of simple natural language processing methods can yield insight into specific disorders as well as mental health writ large, along with evidence that as-of-yet undiscovered linguistic signals relevant to mental health exist in social media. We present a novel method for gathering data for a range of mental illnesses quickly and cheaply, then focus on analysis of four in particular: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, bipolar disorder, and seasonal affective disorder (SAD). We intend for these proof-of-concept results to inform the necessary ethical discussion regarding the balance between the utility of such data and the privacy of mental health related information.  How do people interact with their Facebook wall? At a high level, this question captures the essence of our work. While most prior efforts focus on Twitter, the much fewer Facebook studies focus on the friendship graph or are limited by the amount of users or the duration of the study. In this work, we model Facebook user behavior: we analyze the wall activities of users focusing on identifying common patterns and surprising phenomena. We conduct an extensive study of roughly 7K users over three years during four month intervals each year. We propose PowerWall, a lesser known heavy-tailed distribution to fit our data. Our key results can be summarized in the following points. First, we find that many wall activities, including number of posts, number of likes, number of posts of type photo, etc., can be described by the PowerWall distribution. What is more surprising is that most of these distributions have similar slope, with a value close to 1! Second, we show how our patterns and metrics can help us spot surprising behaviors and anomalies. For example, we find a user posting every two days, exactly the same count of posts; another user posting at midnight, with no other activity before or after. Our work provides a solid step towards a systematic and quantitative wall-centric profiling of Facebook user activity.  Much of the stress and strain of student life remains hidden. The StudentLife continuous sensing app assesses the day-to-day and week-by-week impact of workload on stress, sleep, activity, mood, sociability, mental well-being and academic performance of a single class of 48 students across a 10 week term at Dartmouth College using Android phones. Results from the StudentLife study show a number of significant correlations between the automatic objective sensor data from smartphones and mental health and educational outcomes of the student body. We also identify a Dartmouth term lifecycle in the data that shows students start the term with high positive affect and conversation levels, low stress, and healthy sleep and daily activity patterns. As the term progresses and the workload increases, stress appreciably rises while positive affect, sleep, conversation and activity drops off. The StudentLife dataset is publicly available on the web. We show that easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender. The analysis presented is based on a dataset of over 58,000 volunteers who provided their Facebook Likes, detailed demographic profiles, and the results of several psychometric tests. The proposed model uses dimensionality reduction for preprocessing the Likes data, which are then entered into logistic linear regression to predict individual psychodemographic profiles from Likes. The model correctly discriminates between homosexual and heterosexual men in 88 of cases, African Americans and Caucasian Americans in 95 of cases, and between Democrat and Republican in 85 of cases. For the personality trait “Openness,” prediction accuracy is close to the test–retest accuracy of a standard personality test. We give examples of associations between attributes and Likes and discuss implications for online personalization and privacy. History of mental illness is a major factor behind suicide risk and ideation. However research efforts toward characterizing and forecasting this risk is limited due to the paucity of information regarding suicide ideation, exacerbated by the stigma of mental illness. This paper fills gaps in the literature by developing a statistical methodology to infer which individuals could undergo transitions from mental health discourse to suicidal ideation. We utilize semi-anonymous support communities on Reddit as unobtrusive data sources to infer the likelihood of these shifts. We develop language and interactional measures for this purpose, as well as a propensity score matching based statistical approach. Our approach allows us to derive distinct markers of shifts to suicidal ideation. These markers can be modeled in a prediction framework to identify individuals likely to engage in suicidal ideation in the future. We discuss societ al and ethical implications of this research.