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Abstract A mob is an event that is organized via social media, email, SMS, or other forms of digital communication technologies in which a group of people (who might have an agenda) get together online or offline to collectively conduct an act and then disperse (quickly or over a long period). In recent years, these events are increasingly happening worldwide due to the anonymity of the internet, affordability of social media, boredom, etc. Studying such a phenomenon is difficult due to a lack of data, theoretical underpinning, and resources. In this research, we use the Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) technique to model the mobbers and the Monte Carlo method to assign random values to the factors extracted from the theory of Collective Action and conduct many simulations. We also leverage our previous research on Deviant Cyber Flash Mobs to implement various scenarios the mobber could face when they decide to act in a mob or not. This resulted in a model that can simulate mobs, estimate the mob success rate, and the needed powerful actors (e.g., mob organizers) for a mob to succeed. We finally evaluate our model using real-world mob data collected from the Meetup social media platform. This research is one step toward fully understanding mob formation and the motivations of its participants and organizers. 

Machine learning models to predict refugee crisis situations are still lacking. The model proposed in this work uses a set of predictive features that are indicative of the sociocultural, socioeconomic, and economic characteristics that exist within each country and region. Twenty-eight features were collected for specific countries and years. The feature set was tested in experiments using ordinary least squares regression based on regional subsets. Potential location-based features stood out in our results, such as the global peace index, access to electricity, access to basic water, media censorship, and healthcare. The model performed best for the region of Europe, wherein the features with the most predictive power included access to justice and homicide rate. Corruption features stood out in both Africa and Asia, while population features were dominant in the Americas. Model performance metrics are provided for each experiment. Limitations of this dataset are discussed, as are steps for future work.