Proceedings of the 7th Annual ISC Graduate Research Symposium
ISC-GRS 2013
April 24, 2013, Rolla, Missouri
Sai Preethi Vishwanathan
Department of Computer Science
Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, MO 65409
LOGCHECK: AN API TO DETECT CYBER BULLYING
ABSTRACT
intentional exclusion is imperceptible and usually more
difficult to detect.
In the recent years, with the advent of high-speed
internet and cell phone access, a proportion of
teenagers took bullying from school hallways to
cyberspace. Technology greatly benefits anyone by
allowing immediate access to information. On the
contrary, it is the same technology that allows the
wrongdoers to exploit the innocent, commit crimes
and used as a weapon to harass and stalk people.
Therefore parents and caretakers should take up the
responsibility to help their kids to stay safe online.
Many researchers analyzed the prevalence of cyber
bullying, it’s social and psychological effects on the
minds of children and also provided ways to teach
youngsters about the importance of healthy
communication. But only a handful considered
technology as a tool to detect and help teenagers
from cyber bullying. In this paper, we proposed a
dashboard like interface for parents to detect cyber
bullying in the early stages and help their kids to
psychologically tackle the problems that arise from a
particular situation.
In the recent years, apart from the traditional
forms of bullying and violence, a new form of bullying
emerged and is named cyber bullying. According to the
National Crime Prevention Council, cyber bullying can
be defined as: “when the Internet, cell phones or similar
electronic devices are used to send or post text or
images intended to hurt or embarrass any other person”
[1] .In this new form of bullying one makes use of
mediums such as mobile phones, websites, emails,
instant messaging, text messages, and blogs.
Keywords - cyberbullying, API, interface, Mobile
application, intervention & detection
1. INTRODUCTION
Since the nineties, bullying and violence is in the focus
of public attention and there has been a growing
awareness on the problem. According to one
widespread definition, a person is 'being bullied or
victimized when he or she is exposed repeatedly and
over time, to negative actions on the part of one or more
persons'. It also involves an imbalance of power, where
the victim has difficulty defending him/ her. Bullying
can be either direct or indirect. While direct bullying
involves physical contact with the victim and can be
detected easily, indirect bullying like social isolation,
1
Quantifying the use of technology, a recent
study published that 93% of teenagers have a computer
or access to one at home and 78% of them have a cell
phone, 95% of teens use the internet [3]. With such a
proliferated use of technology, many tragic incidents of
bullying have been escalated. A survey reports [4, 5, 6]
that 70% of the students experience frequent cyber
bullying by using computers and smart phones to send
rumors or post obscene messages. Of all the existing
technologies, the usage of cell phones by 87% of
teenagers makes it the most common medium for cyber
bullying
[figure 1].
Bullying by physical intimidation has been a
difficult problem among teenagers for a long time.
Despite the fact that there might not be any physical
harm, cyber bullying leaves deep emotional scars on the
victim. When compared to traditional forms of
bullying, cyber bullying is considered to be more
persistent. It stretches far beyond the boundaries of
school or workplace. To begin with, cyber bullying
gives a crime doer an unfair advantage to embarrass or
hurt a victim before an entire community, especially in
the social networking websites. Furthermore, cyber
bullying can be done anonymously, which can take
place at any time and considered to be hard to trace.
Copyright 2013 © Missouri S&T
roles of perpetrator, victim, and parent in the cyber
bullying process. By introducing interactive storytelling
with animated on-screen characters where the user gets
to play one of the roles in the bullying scenario, this
application tried to instill children with self-confidence.
Even though the user is educated about the situations,
they are artificially constructed and are not part of their
real lives. For that reason, it suffers from the drawback
that it cannot be applied in real life situations.
Figure 1: Teens use of technology
Cyber bullying will have extremely negative
impact among teenagers. Nancy Willard, author of
Cyber bullying and Cyber threats: Responding to the
Challenge of Online Social Aggression, Threats, and
Distress, indicates that the effects of cyber bullying
may be more harmful. Victims of cyber bullying can
experience symptoms of depression including sadness,
loneliness, insecurity, poor self-esteem, and academic
decline. The feeling of not belonging and suicidal
thoughts behavior can also be an aftereffect.
A disturbing statistic reveals that only 5 % of
the children who attend middle-school actually told
their parents when they were the victims of cyber
bullying [5, 8] and only 15% of the parents polled knew
what cyber bullying exactly was. Therefore there exists
an extreme necessity to detect cyber bullying in early
stages. Parents, family and friends should take up the
responsibility to help kids to psychologically tackle the
situation.
2. RELATED EFFORT
Extensive research has been carried out to uncover the
prevalence of cyber bullying; its social and
psychological effects on victims, and consequences of
the cyber bullying. But relatively very few researchers
thrived to mitigate the cause behind it.
Out of the many applications available in the
market, very few applications have made an effort to
concentrate the bullying problem directly with
software-based solutions. One such project is The
FearNot project [9].This project has studied the use of
virtual learning environments to teach children coping
strategies for bullying based on faux characters. The
developers used virtual characters to play the
2
When a mobile application called LogCheck
was proposed to be developed, the sole idea behind it
was the widespread availability of smart phones among
teenagers.(fig 1) As much as 75% of teenagers have cell
phones and out of 54% of those who text daily , 26%
have been harassed through their cellphone by voice
call or text message besides sexting which is not a form
of harassment in some states , however if images are
shared, the action can lead to harassment and bullying.
LogCheck facilitates parents to actively
monitor the huge amount of mobile phone-based
‘texting’ communications that occur outside of the
scope of social media networking and allow parents to
handle decisively with acts of cyber bullying the instant
they are detected.
One approach that parents can exploit is
filtering or blocking software to restrict teenagers from
accessing social networking Web sites. The
disadvantage with blocking software is that teenagers in
due course will find a technique to outwit the blocking
software. Unlike typical web filtering systems that
block content, LogCheck assists parents to check if
kids are subjected to harassment or not.
With the intention to know what specific
aspects of the aesthetics of the software and the kind of
charts or graphs should be improved and also in order
to give the end user the right cues for credibility and to
ensure comprehensibility, we have explored many
possible applications that focused on user experience
and graphs.
LogCheck illustrates message logs in the form
of methodical charts and graphs[figure 2]. Complicated
information like chat logs are difficult to understand
and needs an illustration. Graphs or charts can help one
to understand things visually and interpret then easily in
less amount of time.
With the aim of providing a highly effective,
easy-to-use solution to monitor and guard kids against
the dangers of the mobile world, partnering with mobile
carrier companies or mobile internet platform provider
is an appropriate solution. Mobile carrier companies are
Copyright 2013 © Missouri S&T
expected to capture relevant communication,
redirecting it for inspection if any calls or text
messages that indicate harassment, stalking, or hate are
observed
As a mobile carrier or mobile internet platform
provider, when partnered with the proposed approach,
carrier companies can benefit from increased business
opportunities and an enhanced image as a socially
responsible company, while giving a highly effective,
easy-to-use solution with which to monitor and guard
their families against the dangers of the mobile world.
Figure 3: Components
LogCheck colloborated with mobile career
services provides network based solution allowing
adults to save messages as evidence and identify bully
by tracking through an internet service provider or cell
phone carrier.
Figure 2 : Visual Representation of messages
Logcheck is a software based solution
composed of following components(figure 3)



LogCheckAPI: It is dashboard like interface
where parents view reports about their child’s
online chat activity, and review suspect
content.
LogCheck Inspector : Text messages
transmitted via mobile devices are analyzed
once inappropriate texting activity is detected
Carrier Server: It deploys LogCheck
Inspector that controls capturing of relevant
communication, redirecting it for inspection
The first step is to install LogCheck mobile
application. So as to access functional system one has
to authenticate with credentials set by carrier service
provider. Understanding parents do not have the time to
go through all of the recorded chat activity, we display
top 5 summary of all of the recorded text activity for an
in-depth, yet quick and easy overview of the most
common persons their child chat with.
To obtain the data for this proof-of-concept,
we have generated chat messages in Google Chat
which is available to any one that uses Gmail. We then
downloaded the messages to my computer (in a text
format) and wrote a Python script to parse the chat
messages to produce a CSV file that can easily be
parsed. The CSV files contains entries that correspond
to
a
single
message
containing
the
fields From, To, Date/Time, and Message.
With Scheme proposed, LogCheck provides
real-time solution for online child safety adapted to
providers of mobile services. Parents can now take an
active part in their children’s online life and rest assured
that they a
re being protected from the dangers of the mobile
world.
3. CONCLUSIONS
With the proposed mobile application, our objective is
not to a attain 100 % confidence in detecting cyber
bullying but to decrease the odds of its happening.
LogCheck likes to avoid directly accusing an individual
of being a bully in any circumstances. If a pattern is
recurring over time, or if it seems to be increasing and
has a consistently negative tone, our confidence in
detecting a potential threat might increase.
4. FUTURE WORK
We concede that the best assessment of this application
can be made if we :
3
Copyright 2013 © Missouri S&T


Design intervention interface by exploring set
of reflective user-interaction paradigms with
the goal of promoting empathy for all
participants (perpetrator, the victim, friends,
family, and teachers ) in the cyber bullying
practice.
Introducing Action Delays that is alerting the
end-user that their input might be hurtful and
making them wait their comment before
actually submitting could also be helpful.
We are currently in the process of developing
our work of updating dictionary of abusive words,
given the propensity for youth to constantly update
language by the use of new words , phrases and
alterations to the meaning of existing words and
phrases, on the site for a real-world, in-situ evaluation
and remain excited about the practical nature of the
research questions that this work has produced.
5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We wish to thank all the people involved in this
research project We wish to acknowledge the support
and cooperation extended to us by intelligent system
center, Missouri University of Science and technology.
4
6. REFERENCES
[1] Olweus
Bullying prevention program,
available
at
http://www.violencepreventionworks.org/publi
c/bullying.page
[2] cyberbullying, The National Crime Prevention,
available at http://www.ncpc.org/cyberbullying
[3] Lenhart, Arafeh, Smith, Rankin Macgill, 2008;
USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital
Future, 2005
[4] Reports available
http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Re
ports/2013/PIP_TeensandTechnology2013.pdf
[5] Stop
cyberbullying
available
at
http://www.stopcyberbullying.org/index2.html
[6] Internet safety 101
available
at
http://www.internetsafety101.org/
[7] Endcyberbuylling available
http://www.endcyberbullying.org/cyberbullying-statistics/
[8] Data based on 2005-06 iSafe survey of 13,000
students
in
grades
5
to
12.
http://www.makeadifferenceforkids.org/index.
php?id=89
[9] Information available at www.Parenting.com
[10] Information
available
at
http://fearnotproject.com/about.php
Copyright 2013 © Missouri S&T