826,439 research outputs found

    Reverse Engineering Socialbot Infiltration Strategies in Twitter

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    Data extracted from social networks like Twitter are increasingly being used to build applications and services that mine and summarize public reactions to events, such as traffic monitoring platforms, identification of epidemic outbreaks, and public perception about people and brands. However, such services are vulnerable to attacks from socialbots āˆ’- automated accounts that mimic real users āˆ’- seeking to tamper statistics by posting messages generated automatically and interacting with legitimate users. Potentially, if created in large scale, socialbots could be used to bias or even invalidate many existing services, by infiltrating the social networks and acquiring trust of other users with time. This study aims at understanding infiltration strategies of socialbots in the Twitter microblogging platform. To this end, we create 120 socialbot accounts with different characteristics and strategies (e.g., gender specified in the profile, how active they are, the method used to generate their tweets, and the group of users they interact with), and investigate the extent to which these bots are able to infiltrate the Twitter social network. Our results show that even socialbots employing simple automated mechanisms are able to successfully infiltrate the network. Additionally, using a 2k2^k factorial design, we quantify infiltration effectiveness of different bot strategies. Our analysis unveils findings that are key for the design of detection and counter measurements approaches

    Rank Preservation and Reversal in Decision Making

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    There are numerous real life examples done by many people which show that the alternatives of a decision sometimes can reverse their original rank order when new alternatives are added or old ones deleted and without bringing in new criteria. There is no mathematical theorem which proves that rank must always be preserved and there cannot be because of real life and hypothetical counter examples in decision making methods. Rank preservation came to be accepted as the standard because of techniques that could only rate alternatives one at a time treating them as independent. Thus an alternative receives a score and it will not change when other alternatives are added or deleted. All methods that only rate alternatives one at a time, thus always preserving rank, may not lead to the right decision; even if they may be right in certain areas of application. In reality, to determine how good an alternative is on an intangible criterion needs experience and knowledge about other alternatives and hence in their evaluation, the alternatives cannot be completely considered as independent of one another

    Face Anti-Spoofing by Learning Polarization Cues in a Real-World Scenario

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    Face anti-spoofing is the key to preventing security breaches in biometric recognition applications. Existing software-based and hardware-based face liveness detection methods are effective in constrained environments or designated datasets only. Deep learning method using RGB and infrared images demands a large amount of training data for new attacks. In this paper, we present a face anti-spoofing method in a real-world scenario by automatic learning the physical characteristics in polarization images of a real face compared to a deceptive attack. A computational framework is developed to extract and classify the unique face features using convolutional neural networks and SVM together. Our real-time polarized face anti-spoofing (PAAS) detection method uses a on-chip integrated polarization imaging sensor with optimized processing algorithms. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantages of the PAAS technique to counter diverse face spoofing attacks (print, replay, mask) in uncontrolled indoor and outdoor conditions by learning polarized face images of 33 people. A four-directional polarized face image dataset is released to inspire future applications within biometric anti-spoofing field.Comment: 14pages,8figure

    Iqbal and Materialism: An Assessment

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    Iqbal reacted to the materialistic philosophies of his time in a highly intellectual manner. He was always an active propounder of resistance against injustice and exploitative materialism.  Therefore, he tried to deconstruct many such notions in his poetry which were responsible for dividing the mankind into the superior and the inferior. He offered counter narrative to the colonial discourse in a very logical way. He tried to show the meaning of love, harmony, peace and co-existence in the age of materialistic competition. Through his innovative concept of Khudi, he tried to remind people of their real worth. He was not in favour of conquering the wretched of the earth, rather, in-treating them with mutual love and respect without differentiating them on the basis of cast, colour and creed. In this paper an attempt will be made to foreground the anti-materialistic dimension in the poetry of Iqbal

    "It is very difficult in this business if you want to have a good conscience": pharmaceutical governance and on-the-ground ethical labour in Ghana

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    The governance of pharmaceutical medicines entails complex ethical decisions that should, in theory, be the responsibility of democratically accountable government agencies. However, in many Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), regulatory and health systems constraints mean that many people still lack access to safe, appropriate and affordable medication, posing significant ethical challenges for those working on the ā€œfront lineā€. Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork in Ghana, we present three detailed case studies of individuals in this position: an urban retail pharmacist, a rural over-the-counter medicine retailer, and a local inspector. Through these case studies, we consider the significant burden of ā€œethical labourā€ borne by those operating ā€œon the groundā€, who navigate complex moral, legal and business imperatives in real time and with very real consequences for those they serve. The paper ends with a reflection on the tensions between abstract, generalised ethical frameworks based on high-level principles, and a pragmatic, contingent ethics-in-practice that foregrounds immediate individual needs ā€“ a tension rooted in the gap between the theory and the reality of pharmaceutical governance that shifts the burden of ethical labour downwards and perpetuates long-term public health risks

    Learning Race and Ethnicity: Hip-Hop 2.0

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    Part of the Volume on Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media In the twenty-first century, a hip hop music label becomes an indispensable source for learning: a young person's resource for information otherwise suppressed by industry regulation, federally censored, or not considered "news worthy" across corporate broadcast modes of distribution. This chapter, "Hip Hop 2.0," examines how hip hop music label Web sites (Guerrillafunk.com and Slamjamz.com) provide an educational space where young people can interact, learn, and discuss "real world" problems via their commitments to popular culture. These internet music labels "sell" more than music. They broaden how cultural entrepreneurial production and innovative citizen initiatives can be re-interpreted by non-broadcast based media, while constituting a counter-public sphere for political activism and learning through networked digital media. Through these practices, we may witness the realization of the Internet's democratizing possibility at a time when these freedoms are not ensured, both off and online

    Systems Developers Define their Own Information Needs

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    Access to the right information is a significant contributor to success in many endeavors. It is, however, difficult to characterize what constitutes right information. This is an important question for systems development projects, which continue to exhibit a sub-par track record of success. This paper describes patterns of information seeking such as nature of information sought and sources of information consulted in the context of tasks performed during systems development projects. The analysis uses task-oriented information seeking as a theoretical perspective, inferring patterns from longitudinal data collected from multiple student teams engaged in real-world systems development efforts. The results show that the nature of tasks themselves varies for routine versus innovative projects, with implications for the nature of information sought and sources consulted. Some of the counter-intuitive findings include increasing incidence of genuine decision tasks over time; and use of the web for genuine decision tasks versus people for routine tasks. Implications of the findings for practice are discussed

    Contractualism and the Counter-Culture Challenge

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    T. M. Scanlonā€™s contractualism attempts to give an account of right and wrong in terms of the moral code that could not be reasonably rejected. Reasonable rejectability is then a function of what kind of consequences the general adoption of different moral codes has for different individuals. It has been shown that moral codes should be compared at a lower than 100% level of social acceptance. This leads to the counter-culture challenge. The problem is that the cultural background of the individuals who have not internalized the majority code affects the consequences of the codes and furthermore there does not seem to be a non-arbitrary way of choosing the minority cultures. This chapter first surveys and critically evaluates different responses to this challenge. It then outlines a version of ā€˜Real World Contractualismā€™, which offers the best response to the counter-culture challenge

    Are You in the Line? RSSI-based Queue Detection in Crowds

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    Crowd behaviour analytics focuses on behavioural characteristics of groups of people instead of individuals' activities. This work considers human queuing behaviour which is a specific crowd behavior of groups. We design a plug-and-play system solution to the queue detection problem based on Wi-Fi/Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) received signal strength indicators (RSSIs) captured by multiple signal sniffers. The goal of this work is to determine if a device is in the queue based on only RSSIs. The key idea is to extract features not only from individual device's data but also mobility similarity between data from multiple devices and mobility correlation observed by multiple sniffers. Thus, we propose single-device feature extraction, cross-device feature extraction, and cross-sniffer feature extraction for model training and classification. We systematically conduct experiments with simulated queue movements to study the detection accuracy. Finally, we compare our signal-based approach against camera-based face detection approach in a real-world social event with a real human queue. The experimental results indicate that our approach can reach minimum accuracy of 77% and it significantly outperforms the camera-based face detection because people block each other's visibility whereas wireless signals can be detected without blocking.Comment: This work has been partially funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme within the project "Worldwide Interoperability for SEmantics IoT" under grant agreement Number 72315
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