Abstract Within two decades, Sierra Leone's ‘cliques’ have transformed from peripheral social clubs to warring Crips, Bloods, and Black street gangs at the heart of criminal political violence. Nevertheless, they remain severely under-studied, with scholarship on Leonean youth marginality heavily focused ex-combatants. Drawing extended fieldwork Freetown's cliques as played ‘game’ – daily hustl...

Violence is a serious problems for cities like Chicago and has been exacerbated by the use of social media by gang-involved youths for taunting rival gangs. We present a corpus of tweets from a young and powerful female gang member and her communicators, which we have annotated with discourse intention, using a deep read to understand how and what triggered conversations to escalate into aggres...

This paper proposes a multimodal framework that clusters spam images so that ones from the same spam source/cluster are grouped together. By identifying the common sources of spam images, we can provide evidence in tracking spam gangs. For this purpose, text recognition and visual feature extraction are performed. Subsequently, a two-level clustering method is applied where images with visually...

The major risks and sources of vulnerability, to which street children may be exposed, relate to shelter, safety and nutri­ tion. Specific health risks associated with untreated ill­ nesses and injuries, glue sniffing and sexual activities, are also threatening to them. In particular, street children are in danger from: • physical exposure to cold and damp, due to lack of shelter and insufficie...

The Seldon project represents a multi-disciplinary approach to developing organization software for the study of recruitment and group formation. The need to incorporate aspects of social science added a significant contribution to the vision of the resulting Seldon toolkit. The unique addition of an abstract agent category provided a means for capturing social concepts like cliques, gangs, sch...