8,996 research outputs found
SybilBelief: A Semi-supervised Learning Approach for Structure-based Sybil Detection
Sybil attacks are a fundamental threat to the security of distributed
systems. Recently, there has been a growing interest in leveraging social
networks to mitigate Sybil attacks. However, the existing approaches suffer
from one or more drawbacks, including bootstrapping from either only known
benign or known Sybil nodes, failing to tolerate noise in their prior knowledge
about known benign or Sybil nodes, and being not scalable.
In this work, we aim to overcome these drawbacks. Towards this goal, we
introduce SybilBelief, a semi-supervised learning framework, to detect Sybil
nodes. SybilBelief takes a social network of the nodes in the system, a small
set of known benign nodes, and, optionally, a small set of known Sybils as
input. Then SybilBelief propagates the label information from the known benign
and/or Sybil nodes to the remaining nodes in the system.
We evaluate SybilBelief using both synthetic and real world social network
topologies. We show that SybilBelief is able to accurately identify Sybil nodes
with low false positive rates and low false negative rates. SybilBelief is
resilient to noise in our prior knowledge about known benign and Sybil nodes.
Moreover, SybilBelief performs orders of magnitudes better than existing Sybil
classification mechanisms and significantly better than existing Sybil ranking
mechanisms.Comment: 12 page
Automated construction and analysis of political networks via open government and media sources
We present a tool to generate real world political networks from user provided lists of politicians and news sites. Additional output includes visualizations, interactive tools and maps that allow a user to better understand the politicians and their surrounding environments as portrayed by the media. As a case study, we construct a comprehensive list of current Texas politicians, select news sites that convey a spectrum of political viewpoints covering Texas politics, and examine the results. We propose a ”Combined” co-occurrence distance metric to better reflect the relationship between two entities. A topic modeling technique is also proposed as a novel, automated way of labeling communities that exist within a politician’s ”extended” network.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Focused image search in the social Web.
Recently, social multimedia-sharing websites, which allow users to upload, annotate, and share online photo or video collections, have become increasingly popular. The user tags or annotations constitute the new multimedia meta-data . We present an image search system that exploits both image textual and visual information. First, we use focused crawling and DOM Tree based web data extraction methods to extract image textual features from social networking image collections. Second, we propose the concept of visual words to handle the image\u27s visual content for fast indexing and searching. We also develop several user friendly search options to allow users to query the index using words and image feature descriptions (visual words). The developed image search system tries to bridge the gap between the scalable industrial image search engines, which are based on keyword search, and the slower content based image retrieval systems developed mostly in the academic field and designed to search based on image content only. We have implemented a working prototype by crawling and indexing over 16,056 images from flickr.com, one of the most popular image sharing websites. Our experimental results on a working prototype confirm the efficiency and effectiveness of the methods, that we proposed
Topicality and Social Impact: Diverse Messages but Focused Messengers
Are users who comment on a variety of matters more likely to achieve high
influence than those who delve into one focused field? Do general Twitter
hashtags, such as #lol, tend to be more popular than novel ones, such as
#instantlyinlove? Questions like these demand a way to detect topics hidden
behind messages associated with an individual or a hashtag, and a gauge of
similarity among these topics. Here we develop such an approach to identify
clusters of similar hashtags by detecting communities in the hashtag
co-occurrence network. Then the topical diversity of a user's interests is
quantified by the entropy of her hashtags across different topic clusters. A
similar measure is applied to hashtags, based on co-occurring tags. We find
that high topical diversity of early adopters or co-occurring tags implies high
future popularity of hashtags. In contrast, low diversity helps an individual
accumulate social influence. In short, diverse messages and focused messengers
are more likely to gain impact.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, 6 table
The re-birth of the "beat": A hyperlocal online newsgathering model
This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Journalism Practice, 6(5-6), 754 - 765, 2012, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17512786.2012.667279.Scholars have long lamented the death of the 'beat' in news journalism. Today's journalists generate more copy than they used to, a deluge of PR releases often keeping them in the office, and away from their communities. Consolidation in industry has dislodged some journalists from their local sources. Yet hyperlocal online activity is thriving if journalists have the time and inclination to engage with it. This paper proposes an exploratory, normative schema intended to help local journalists systematically map and monitor their own hyperlocal online communities and contacts, with the aim of re-establishing local news beats online as networks. This model is, in part, technologically-independent. It encompasses proactive and reactive news-gathering and forward planning approaches. A schema is proposed, developed upon suggested news-gathering frameworks from the literature. These experiences were distilled into an iterative, replicable schema for local journalism. This model was then used to map out two real-world 'beats' for local news-gathering. Journalists working within these local beats were invited to trial the models created. It is hoped that this research will empower journalists by improving their information auditing, and could help re-define journalists' relationship with their online audiences
Engineering issues for the web 2.0
Presentación de los contenidos de la revista.Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad
Regression and Learning to Rank Aggregation for User Engagement Evaluation
User engagement refers to the amount of interaction an instance (e.g., tweet,
news, and forum post) achieves. Ranking the items in social media websites
based on the amount of user participation in them, can be used in different
applications, such as recommender systems. In this paper, we consider a tweet
containing a rating for a movie as an instance and focus on ranking the
instances of each user based on their engagement, i.e., the total number of
retweets and favorites it will gain.
For this task, we define several features which can be extracted from the
meta-data of each tweet. The features are partitioned into three categories:
user-based, movie-based, and tweet-based. We show that in order to obtain good
results, features from all categories should be considered. We exploit
regression and learning to rank methods to rank the tweets and propose to
aggregate the results of regression and learning to rank methods to achieve
better performance. We have run our experiments on an extended version of
MovieTweeting dataset provided by ACM RecSys Challenge 2014. The results show
that learning to rank approach outperforms most of the regression models and
the combination can improve the performance significantly.Comment: In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Recommender Systems Challenge,
RecSysChallenge '1
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