{"id":4050,"date":"2021-03-30T21:03:53","date_gmt":"2021-03-30T21:03:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/?p=1344869"},"modified":"2021-03-30T21:03:53","modified_gmt":"2021-03-30T21:03:53","slug":"scientists-used-ai-to-link-cryptomarkets-with-substance-abusers-on-reddit-and-twitter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/?p=4050","title":{"rendered":"Scientists used AI to link cryptomarkets with substance abusers on Reddit and Twitter"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>An international team of researchers recently developed an AI system that pieces together bits of information from dark web cryptomarkets, Twitter, and Reddit in order to better understand substance abusers.<\/p>\n<p>Don\u2019t worry, it doesn\u2019t track sales or expose users. It helps scientists better understand how substance abusers feel and what terms they\u2019re using to describe their experiences.<\/p>\n<p><figure class=\"post-image post-mediaBleed aligncenter\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1344887 aligncenter lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2021\/03\/table1AIdope.jpg\" alt width=\"1602\" height=\"667\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1602px) 100vw, 1602px\" data-lazy=\"true\" data-srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2021\/03\/table1AIdope.jpg 1602w, https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2021\/03\/table1AIdope-280x117.jpg 280w, https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2021\/03\/table1AIdope-540x225.jpg 540w, https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2021\/03\/table1AIdope-270x112.jpg 270w, https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2021\/03\/table1AIdope-796x331.jpg 796w, https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2021\/03\/table1AIdope-1592x663.jpg 1592w\"><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n<p>The relationship between mental health and substance abuse is well-studied in clinical environments, but how users discuss and interact with one another in the real world remains beyond the realm of most scientific studies.<\/p>\n<p>According to the team\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/pdf\/2103.15764.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">paper<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote readability=\"13\">\n<p>Recent results from the Global Drug Survey suggest that the percentage of participants who have been purchasing drugs through cryptomarkets has tripled since 2014 reaching 15 percent of the 2020 respondents (GDS).<\/p>\n<p>In this study, we assess social media data from active opioid users to understand what are the behaviors associated with opioid usage to identify what types of feelings are expressed. We employ deep learning models to perform sentiment and emotion analysis of social media data with the drug entities derived from cryptomarkets.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The team developed an AI to crawl three popular cryptomarkets where drugs are sold in order to determine nuanced information about what people were searching for and purchasing.<\/p>\n<p><figure class=\"post-image post-mediaBleed aligncenter\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1344889 aligncenter lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2021\/03\/table2AIdope.jpg\" alt width=\"1152\" height=\"527\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1152px) 100vw, 1152px\" data-lazy=\"true\" data-srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2021\/03\/table2AIdope.jpg 1152w, https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2021\/03\/table2AIdope-280x128.jpg 280w, https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2021\/03\/table2AIdope-540x247.jpg 540w, https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2021\/03\/table2AIdope-270x124.jpg 270w, https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2021\/03\/table2AIdope-796x364.jpg 796w\"><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n<p>Then they crawled popular drug-related subreddits on Reddit such as r\/opiates and r\/drugnerds for posts related to the cryptomarket terminology in order to gather emotional sentiment. Where the researchers found difficulties in gathering enough Reddit posts with easy-to-label emotional sentiment, they found Twitter posts with relevant hashtags to fill in the gaps.<\/p>\n<p>The end result was a data cornucopia that allowed the team to determine a robust emotional sentiment analysis for various substances.<\/p>\n<p>In the future, the team hopes to find a way to gain better access to dark web cryptomarkets in order to create stronger sentiment models. The ultimate goal of the project is to help healthcare professionals better understand the relationship between mental health and substance abuse.<\/p>\n<p>Per the team\u2019s paper:<\/p>\n<blockquote readability=\"7\">\n<p>To identify the best strategies to reduce opioid misuse, a better understanding of cryptomarket drug sales that impact consumption and how it reflects social media discussions is needed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p class=\"c-post-pubDate\"> Published March 30, 2021 \u2014 21:03 UTC <\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/neural\/2021\/03\/30\/scientists-artificial-ai-link-cryptomarkets-heroin-fentanyl-substance-abusers-reddit-twitter\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An international team of researchers recently developed an AI system that pieces together bits of information from dark web cryptomarkets, Twitter, and Reddit in order to better understand substance abusers. Don\u2019t worry,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4051,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4050"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4050\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}