11,679 research outputs found
Fundamental structures of dynamic social networks
Social systems are in a constant state of flux with dynamics spanning from
minute-by-minute changes to patterns present on the timescale of years.
Accurate models of social dynamics are important for understanding spreading of
influence or diseases, formation of friendships, and the productivity of teams.
While there has been much progress on understanding complex networks over the
past decade, little is known about the regularities governing the
micro-dynamics of social networks. Here we explore the dynamic social network
of a densely-connected population of approximately 1000 individuals and their
interactions in the network of real-world person-to-person proximity measured
via Bluetooth, as well as their telecommunication networks, online social media
contacts, geo-location, and demographic data. These high-resolution data allow
us to observe social groups directly, rendering community detection
unnecessary. Starting from 5-minute time slices we uncover dynamic social
structures expressed on multiple timescales. On the hourly timescale, we find
that gatherings are fluid, with members coming and going, but organized via a
stable core of individuals. Each core represents a social context. Cores
exhibit a pattern of recurring meetings across weeks and months, each with
varying degrees of regularity. Taken together, these findings provide a
powerful simplification of the social network, where cores represent
fundamental structures expressed with strong temporal and spatial regularity.
Using this framework, we explore the complex interplay between social and
geospatial behavior, documenting how the formation of cores are preceded by
coordination behavior in the communication networks, and demonstrating that
social behavior can be predicted with high precision.Comment: Main Manuscript: 16 pages, 4 figures. Supplementary Information: 39
pages, 34 figure
Principal Patterns on Graphs: Discovering Coherent Structures in Datasets
Graphs are now ubiquitous in almost every field of research. Recently, new
research areas devoted to the analysis of graphs and data associated to their
vertices have emerged. Focusing on dynamical processes, we propose a fast,
robust and scalable framework for retrieving and analyzing recurring patterns
of activity on graphs. Our method relies on a novel type of multilayer graph
that encodes the spreading or propagation of events between successive time
steps. We demonstrate the versatility of our method by applying it on three
different real-world examples. Firstly, we study how rumor spreads on a social
network. Secondly, we reveal congestion patterns of pedestrians in a train
station. Finally, we show how patterns of audio playlists can be used in a
recommender system. In each example, relevant information previously hidden in
the data is extracted in a very efficient manner, emphasizing the scalability
of our method. With a parallel implementation scaling linearly with the size of
the dataset, our framework easily handles millions of nodes on a single
commodity server
An Empirical Study on Android for Saving Non-shared Data on Public Storage
With millions of apps that can be downloaded from official or third-party
market, Android has become one of the most popular mobile platforms today.
These apps help people in all kinds of ways and thus have access to lots of
user's data that in general fall into three categories: sensitive data, data to
be shared with other apps, and non-sensitive data not to be shared with others.
For the first and second type of data, Android has provided very good storage
models: an app's private sensitive data are saved to its private folder that
can only be access by the app itself, and the data to be shared are saved to
public storage (either the external SD card or the emulated SD card area on
internal FLASH memory). But for the last type, i.e., an app's non-sensitive and
non-shared data, there is a big problem in Android's current storage model
which essentially encourages an app to save its non-sensitive data to shared
public storage that can be accessed by other apps. At first glance, it seems no
problem to do so, as those data are non-sensitive after all, but it implicitly
assumes that app developers could correctly identify all sensitive data and
prevent all possible information leakage from private-but-non-sensitive data.
In this paper, we will demonstrate that this is an invalid assumption with a
thorough survey on information leaks of those apps that had followed Android's
recommended storage model for non-sensitive data. Our studies showed that
highly sensitive information from billions of users can be easily hacked by
exploiting the mentioned problematic storage model. Although our empirical
studies are based on a limited set of apps, the identified problems are never
isolated or accidental bugs of those apps being investigated. On the contrary,
the problem is rooted from the vulnerable storage model recommended by Android.
To mitigate the threat, we also propose a defense framework
Mining for Social Serendipity
A common social problem at an event in which people do not personally know all of the other participants is the natural tendency for cliques to form and for discussions to mainly happen between people who already know each other. This limits the possibility for people to make interesting new acquaintances and acts as a retarding force in the creation of new links in the social web. Encouraging users to socialize with people they don't know by revealing to them hidden surprising links could help to improve the diversity of interactions at an event. The goal of this paper is to propose a method for detecting "surprising" relationships between people attending an event. By "surprising" relationship we mean those relationships that are not known a priori, and that imply shared information not directly related with the local context of the event (location, interests, contacts) at which the meeting takes place. To demonstrate and test our concept we used the Flickr community. We focused on a community of users associated with a social event (a computer science conference) and represented in Flickr by means of a photo pool devoted to the event. We use Flickr metadata (tags) to mine for user similarity not related to the context of the event, as represented in the corresponding Flickr group. For example, we look for two group members who have been in the same highly specific place (identified by means of geo-tagged photos), but are not friends of each other and share no other common interests or, social neighborhood
Identifying the underlying structure and dynamic interactions in a voting network
We analyse the structure and behaviour of a specific voting network using a
dynamic structure-based methodology which draws on Q-Analysis and social
network theory. Our empirical focus is on the Eurovision Song Contest over a
period of 20 years. For a multicultural contest of this kind, one of the key
questions is how the quality of a song is judged and how voting groups emerge.
We investigate structures that may identify the winner based purely on the
topology of the network. This provides a basic framework to identify what the
characteristics associated with becoming a winner are, and may help to
establish a homogenous criterion for subjective measures such as quality.
Further, we measure the importance of voting cliques, and present a dynamic
model based on a changing multidimensional measure of connectivity in order to
reveal the formation of emerging community structure within the contest.
Finally, we study the dynamic behaviour exhibited by the network in order to
understand the clustering of voting preferences and the relationship between
local and global properties.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables, submitted to Physica
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