Social Network Signal Processing for Cyber-Physical Systems

This chapter demonstrates the utility of exploiting signal processing techniques common to physical sensing modalities in order to reconstruct conditions of the physical world from social network feeds. We show that, as a sensing modality, social sensing is not unlike acoustic, vibration, or magnetic sensing. A mathematical analogy is presented between social networks and physical media that allows adaptation of signal processing algorithms derived for the latter to solve novel challenges observed in the former. The chapter describes examples of event identification and tracking using Twitter and Instagram data, and presents the underlying analytical foundations.