Systems Applications of Social Networks

The aim of this article is to provide an understanding of social networks as a useful addition to the standard tool-box of techniques used by system designers. To this end, we give examples of how data about social links have been collected and used in di erent application contexts. We develop a broad taxonomy-based overview of common properties of social networks, review how they might be used in di erent applications, and point out potential pitfalls where appropriate. We propose a framework, distinguishing between two main types of social network-based user selection-personalised user selection which identi es target users who may be relevant for a given source node, using the social network around the source as a context, and generic user selection or group delimitation, which lters for a set of users who satisfy a set of application requirements based on their social properties. Using this framework, we survey applications of social networks in three typical kinds of application scenarios: recommender systems, content-sharing systems (e.g., P2P or video streaming), and systems which defend against users who abuse the system (e.g., spam or sybil attacks). In each case, we discuss potential directions for future research that involve using social network properties.Comment: Will appear in ACM computing Survey

New Threats to SMS-Assisted Mobile Internet Services from 4G LTE: Lessons Learnt from Distributed Mobile-Initiated Attacks towards Facebook and Other Services

Mobile Internet is becoming the norm. With more personalized mobile devices in hand, many services choose to offer alternative, usually more convenient, approaches to authenticating and delivering the content between mobile users and service providers. One main option is to use SMS (i.e., short messaging service). Such carrier-grade text service has been widely used to assist versatile mobile services, including social networking, banking, to name a few. Though the text service can be spoofed via certain Internet text service providers which cooperated with carriers, such attacks haven well studied and defended by industry due to the efforts of research community. However, as cellular network technology advances to the latest IP-based 4G LTE, we find that these mobile services are somehow exposed to new threats raised by this change, particularly on 4G LTE Text service (via brand-new distributed Mobile-Initiated Spoofed SMS attack which is not available in legacy 2G/3G systems). The reason is that messaging service over LTE shifts from the circuit-switched (CS) design to the packet-switched (PS) paradigm as 4G LTE supports PS only. Due to this change, 4G LTE Text Service becomes open to access. However, its shields to messaging integrity and user authentication are not in place. As a consequence, such weaknesses can be exploited to launch attacks (e.g., hijack Facebook accounts) against a targeted individual, a large scale of mobile users and even service providers, from mobile devices. Current defenses for Internet-Initiated Spoofed SMS attacks cannot defend the unprecedented attack. Our study shows that 53 of 64 mobile services over 27 industries are vulnerable to at least one threat. We validate these proof-of-concept attacks in one major US carrier which supports more than 100 million users. We finally propose quick fixes and discuss security insights and lessons we have learnt.Comment: 16 pages, 13 figure

Network Coding Meets Information-Centric Networking

The focus of user behavior in the Internet has changed over the recent years towards being driven by exchanging and accessing information. Many advances in networking technologies have utilized this change by focusing on the content of an exchange rather than the endpoints exchanging the content. Network coding and information centric networking are two examples of these technology trends, each being developed largely independent so far. This paper brings these areas together in an evolutionary as well as explorative setting for a new internetworking architecture. We outline opportunities for applying network coding in a novel and performance-enhancing way that could eventually push forward the case for information centric network itself.Comment: 6 pages, position pape

Analytics for the Internet of Things: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) envisions a world-wide, interconnected network of smart physical entities. These physical entities generate a large amount of data in operation and as the IoT gains momentum in terms of deployment, the combined scale of those data seems destined to continue to grow. Increasingly, applications for the IoT involve analytics. Data analytics is the process of deriving knowledge from data, generating value like actionable insights from them. This article reviews work in the IoT and big data analytics from the perspective of their utility in creating efficient, effective and innovative applications and services for a wide spectrum of domains. We review the broad vision for the IoT as it is shaped in various communities, examine the application of data analytics across IoT domains, provide a categorisation of analytic approaches and propose a layered taxonomy from IoT data to analytics. This taxonomy provides us with insights on the appropriateness of analytical techniques, which in turn shapes a survey of enabling technology and infrastructure for IoT analytics. Finally, we look at some tradeoffs for analytics in the IoT that can shape future research

Spatio-Temporal Modeling of Wireless Users Internet Access Patterns Using Self-Organizing Maps

User online behavior and interests will play a central role in future mobile networks. We introduce a systematic method for large-scale multi-dimensional analysis of online activity for thousands of mobile users across 79 buildings over a variety of web domains. We propose a modeling approach based on self-organizing maps (SOM) for discovering, organizing and visualizing different mobile users' trends from billions of WLAN records. We find surprisingly that users' trends based on domains and locations can be accurately modeled using a self-organizing map with clearly distinct characteristics. We also find many non-trivial correlations between different types of web domains and locations. Based on our analysis, we introduce a mixture model as an initial step towards realistic simulation of wireless network usage

Privacy Prediction of Images Shared on Social Media Sites Using Deep Features

Online image sharing in social media sites such as Facebook, Flickr, and Instagram can lead to unwanted disclosure and privacy violations, when privacy settings are used inappropriately. With the exponential increase in the number of images that are shared online every day, the development of effective and efficient prediction methods for image privacy settings are highly needed. The performance of models critically depends on the choice of the feature representation. In this paper, we present an approach to image privacy prediction that uses deep features and deep image tags as feature representations. Specifically, we explore deep features at various neural network layers and use the top layer (probability) as an auto-annotation mechanism. The results of our experiments show that models trained on the proposed deep features and deep image tags substantially outperform baselines such as those based on SIFT and GIST as well as those that use "bag of tags" as features

Cities of the Future: Employing Wireless Sensor Networks for Efficient Decision Making in Complex Environments

Decision making in large scale urban environments is critical for many applications involving continuous distribution of resources and utilization of infrastructure, such as ambient lighting control and traffic management. Traditional decision making methods involve extensive human participation, are expensive, and inefficient and unreliable for hard-to-predict situations. Modern technology, including ubiquitous data collection though sensors, automated analysis and prognosis, and online optimization, offers new capabilities for developing flexible, autonomous, scalable, efficient, and predictable control methods. This paper presents a new decision making concept in which a hierarchy of semantically more abstract models are utilized to perform online scalable and predictable control. The lower semantic levels perform localized decisions based on sampled data from the environment, while the higher semantic levels provide more global, time invariant results based on aggregated data from the lower levels. There is a continuous feedback between the levels of the semantic hierarchy, in which the upper levels set performance guaranteeing constraints for the lower levels, while the lower levels indicate whether these constraints are feasible or not. Even though the semantic hierarchy is not tied to a particular set of description models, the paper illustrates a hierarchy used for traffic management applications and composed of Finite State Machines, Conditional Task Graphs, Markov Decision Processes, and functional graphs. The paper also summarizes some of the main research problems that must be addressed as part of the proposed concep

Using Social Information for Flow Allocation in MANETs

Adhoc networks enable communication between distributed, mobile wireless nodes without any supporting infrastructure. In the absence of centralized control, such networks require node interaction, and are inherently based on cooperation between nodes. In this paper, we use social and behavioral trust of nodes to form a flow allocation optimization problem. We initialize trust using information gained from users' social relationships (from social networks) and update the trusts metric over time based on observed node behaviors. We conduct analysis of social trust using real data sets and used it as a parameter for performance evaluation of our frame work in ns-3. Based on our approach we obtain a significant improvement in both detection rate and packet delivery ratio using social trust information when compared to behavioral trust alone. Further, we observe that social trust is critical in the event of mobility and plays a crucial role in bootstrapping the computation of trust

Knowledge society arguments revisited in the semantic technologies era

In the light of high profile governmental and international efforts to realise the knowledge society, I review the arguments made for and against it from a technology standpoint. I focus on advanced knowledge technologies with applications on a large scale and in open- ended environments like the World Wide Web and its ambitious extension, the Semantic Web. I argue for a greater role of social networks in a knowledge society and I explore the recent developments in mechanised trust, knowledge certification, and speculate on their blending with traditional societal institutions. These form the basis of a sketched roadmap for enabling technologies for a knowledge society

Data Management in Industry 4.0: State of the Art and Open Challenges

Information and communication technologies are permeating all aspects of industrial and manufacturing systems, expediting the generation of large volumes of industrial data. This article surveys the recent literature on data management as it applies to networked industrial environments and identifies several open research challenges for the future. As a first step, we extract important data properties (volume, variety, traffic, criticality) and identify the corresponding data enabling technologies of diverse fundamental industrial use cases, based on practical applications. Secondly, we provide a detailed outline of recent industrial architectural designs with respect to their data management philosophy (data presence, data coordination, data computation) and the extent of their distributiveness. Then, we conduct a holistic survey of the recent literature from which we derive a taxonomy of the latest advances on industrial data enabling technologies and data centric services, spanning all the way from the field level deep in the physical deployments, up to the cloud and applications level. Finally, motivated by the rich conclusions of this critical analysis, we identify interesting open challenges for future research. The concepts presented in this article thematically cover the largest part of the industrial automation pyramid layers. Our approach is multidisciplinary, as the selected publications were drawn from two fields; the communications, networking and computation field as well as the industrial, manufacturing and automation field. The article can help the readers to deeply understand how data management is currently applied in networked industrial environments, and select interesting open research opportunities to pursue