Determining WWW User's Next Access and Its Application to Pre-fetching

World-Wide Web (WWW) services have grown to levels where significant delays are expected to happen. Techniques like pre-fetching are likely to help users to personalize their needs, reducing their waiting times. However, pre-fetching is only effective if the right documents are identified and if user's move is correctly predicted. Otherwise, pre-fetching will only waste bandwidth. Therefore, it is productive to determine whether a revisit will occur or not, before starting pre-fetching. In this paper we develop two user models that help determining user's next move. One model uses Random Walk approximation and the other is based on Digital Signal Processing techniques. We also give hints on how to use such models with a simple pre-fetching technique that we are developing.CNP

Incorporating video into Google MSV

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 52).Mobile Street View is a compelling application but suffers from significant latency problems, especially in limited bandwidth circumstances. Currently, the application uses static images to display street level information. Utilizing video in addition to images has the potential to improve the Street View user experience. In this paper, we examine the design and performance of mobile Street View and consider how to use video to reduce user visible latency. Video also allows for alternate navigation methods which could improve the application's ease of use. We created a prototype on Android to examine the plausibility of incorporating video into mobile Street View. Comparing the performance of our video prototype to the traditional step-by-step Street View approach, we found a 4x increase in the speed of viewing an entire street. For the video prototype I also found significant improvement in both user visible latencies and useful screen time. Additionally, I found that the time to fetch video chunks was less than the time to display them.by Christina Wright.M.Eng

PARTE : automatic program partitioning for efficient computation over encrypted data

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 45-47).Many modern applications outsource their data storage and computation needs to third parties. Although this lifts many infrastructure burdens from the application developer, he must deal with an increased risk of data leakage (i.e. there are more distributed copies of the data, the third party may be insecure and/or untrustworthy). Oftentimes, the most practical option is to tolerate this risk. This is far from ideal and in case of highly sensitive data (e.g. medical records, location history) it is unacceptable. We present PARTE, a tool to aid application developers in lowering the risk of data leakage. PARTE statically analyzes a program's source, annotated to indicate types which will hold sensitive data (i.e. data that should not be leaked), and outputs a partitioned version of the source. One partition will operate only on encrypted copies of sensitive data to lower the risk of data leakage and can safely be run by a third party or otherwise untrusted environment. The second partition must have plaintext access to sensitive data and therefore should be run in a trusted environment. Program execution will flow between the partitions, levaraging third party resources when data leakage risk is low. Further, we identify operations which, if efficiently supported by some encryption scheme, would improve the performance of partitioned execution. To demonstrate the feasiblity of these ideas, we implement PARTE in Haskell and run it on a web application, hpaste, which allows users to upload and share text snippets. The partitioned hpaste services web request 1.2 - 2.5 x slower than the original hpaste. We find this overhead to be moderately high. Moreover, the partitioning does not allow much code to run on encrypted data. We discuss why we feel our techniques did not produce an attractive partitioning and offer insight on new research directions which could yield better results.by Meelap Shah.S.M

Clustering of Web Users Using Session-based Similarity Measures

One important research topic in web usage mining is the clustering of web users based on their common properties. Informative knowledge obtained from web user clusters were used for many applications, such as the prefetching of pages between web clients and proxies. This paper presents an approach for measuring similarity of interests among web users from their past access behaviors. The similarity measures are based on the user sessions extracted from the user\u27s access logs. A multi-level scheme for clustering a large number of web users is proposed, as an extension to the method proposed in our previous work (2001). Experiments were conducted and the results obtained show that our clustering method is capable of clustering web users with similar interest

User authentication and remote execution across administrative domains

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-77).(cont.) selectively delegates authority to processes running on remote machines that need to access other resources. The delegation mechanism lets users incrementally construct trust policies for remote machines. Measurements of the system demonstrate that the modularity of REX's architecture does not come at the cost of performance.A challenge in today's Internet is providing easy collaboration across administrative boundaries. Using and sharing resources between individuals in different administrative domains should be just as easy and secure as sharing them within a single domain. This thesis presents a new authentication service and a new remote login and execution utility that address this challenge. The authentication service contributes a new design point in the space of user authentication systems. The system provides the flexibility to create cross-domain groups in the context of a global, network file system using a familiar, intuitive interface for sharing files that is similar to local access control mechanisms. The system trades off freshness for availability by pre-fetching and caching remote users and groups defined in other administrative domains, so the file server can make authorization decisions at file-access time using only local information. The system offers limited privacy for group lists and has all-or-nothing delegation to other administrative domains via nested groups. Experiments demonstrate that the authentication server scales to groups with tens of thousands of members. REX contributes a new architecture for remote execution that offers extensibility and security. To achieve extensibility, REX bases much of its functionality on a single new abstraction-emulated file descriptor passing across machines. This abstraction is powerful enough for users to extend REX's functionality in many ways without changing the core software or protocol. REX addresses security in two ways. First, the implementation internally leverages file descriptor passing to split the server into several smaller programs, reducing both privileged and remotely exploitable code. Second, REXby Michael Kaminsky.Ph.D

SENTIMENT ANALYSIS IN SOCIAL NETWORKS USING NAiVE BAYES ALGORITHM

This report is concerned with the opinion mining and sentiment analysis in social networks especially Twitter, it aims to give a brief insight into the ongoing research in sentiment analysis algorithms and techniques, and graphical representation of the statistical results by applying the sentiment analysis on social networks. The objectives of this project is to perform a detailed research on the latest techniques in the process, and to enhance the current approaches of sentiment analysis by building a tool with an ability to provide statistical information, graphically represented -to an acceptable degree of accuracy- to show the collective consciousness of Internet users. The implementation of this project will most probably use third party tools available on the web to reduce time needed and for rapid prototyping in the initial stages of implementation

Abstraction models at system level for networked interactive multimedia scripting

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1995.Includes bibliographical references (p. 85-86).by Jimmy Chi-Ming Lai.M.Eng

Push-based web filtering using PICS Profiles

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1998.Includes bibliographical references (p. 44).by David M. Shapiro.M.Eng