3 research outputs found
An ant-inspired, deniable routing approach in ad hoc question & answer networks
The ubiquity of the Internet facilitates electronic question and answering
(Q&A) between real people with ease via community portals and social networking
websites. It is a useful service which allows users to appeal to a broad
range of answerers. In most cases however, Q&A services produce answers
by presenting questions to the general public or associated digital community
with little regard for the amount of time users spend examining and answering
them. Ultimately, a question may receive large amounts of attention but still
not be answered adequately.
Several existing pieces of research investigate the reasons why questions do
not receive answers on Q&A services and suggest that it may be associated
with users being afraid of expressing themselves. Q&A works well for solving
information needs, however, it rarely takes into account the privacy requirements
of the users who form the service.
This thesis was motivated by the need for a more targeted approach towards
Q&A by distributing the service across ad hoc networks. The main
contribution of this thesis is a novel routing technique and networking environment
(distributed Q&A) which balances answer quality and user attention
while protecting privacy through plausible deniability. Routing approaches
are evaluated experimentally by statistics gained from peer-to-peer network
simulations, composed of Q&A users modelled via features extracted from the
analysis of a large Yahoo! Answers dataset. Suggestions for future directions
to this work are presented from the knowledge gained from our results and
conclusion