Manita Pote

Hi, I’m Manita Pote. I am a PhD student in Informatics, Complex Networks and System at Indiana University, Bloomington supervised by Prof. Fil Menczer, Prof. Alessandro Flammini and Prof. Zoran Tiganj. My research interests lie in social media data mining, computational social science, network science to understand abusive user behavior for platform integrity and in developing machine learning/deep learning tools to curb those behaviors. I primarily focus on the detection of inauthentic coordination, identifying coordinated efforts and strategies used in influence operations campaigns on social networks. Check out some of my blogs on the computational methods I use in my research Link.

Before PhD:
I have a Bachelors’s Degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from IOE, Pulchowk Campus, Tribhuwan University and 3 years of industry experience as ‘Software Engineer’ (Web Application, REST API development for mobile application and GIS softwares) and a year of freelancing experinece. Checkout the project I did in industry and as a freelancer Link.

Connect with me: LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Scholar and Github.

Work In Progress

  1. Coordinated Reply Attacks in Influence Campaigns: Characterization and Detection
    A machine learning model for detection of the actors involved in coordinated reply attack.
  2. BLOC2Vec: Vector Representation of User Behavior in Social Media
    Comparison of embedding models for vector representation of sequential social media user behavior and evaluation on coordination detection
  3. Role of Third Party Apps in Inauthentic Coordination
    Understand how third party apps help in inauthentic coordination in Influence Campaigns and develop method to detect the abusive behavior
  4. Influence Operation Control Dataset
    Control data-set for the Twitter Influence Operation Data

Peer Reviewed Published Papers

  1. A multi-platform collection of social media posts about the 2022 U.S. midterm elections (2023)
    Rachith Aiyappa*, Matthew R. DeVerna*, Manita Pote*, Wanying Zhao*, Bao Tran Truong*, David Axelrod, Aria Pessianzadeh, Zoher Kachwala, Munjung Kim, Ozgur Can Seckin, Minsuk Kim, Sunny Gandhi, Amrutha Manikonda, Francesco Pierri, Filippo Menczer, Kai-Cheng Yang
    Proceedings of the Seventeenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 17(1), 981-989. [PDF]
  2. Manipulating Twitter Through Deletions (2022)
    Christopher Torres-Lugo*, Manita Pote*, Alexander C. Nwala & Filippo Menczer
    Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 16(1), 1029-1039. [PDF]

Services

ORCID LINK
  1. Program Committee Member, CySoc 2024 International Workshop on Cyber Social Threats (ICWSM) [Link]
  2. Reviewer at IC2S2 2024 LINK
  3. Program Committee Member, CySoc 2023 International Workshop on Cyber Social Threats [Link]
  4. Reviewer at The Web Conference 2023
  5. Reviewer at EPJ Data Science 2023 [Link]
  6. Volunteer at ICWSM (2022) [Link]