The Politics of Social Filtering

Social filtering – the selective engagement with people, communication and other information as a result of the recommendations of others – has always taken place. However, the possibilities of the Internet combined with the growth of online social networking activities have enabled this process to become rapidly more extensive, easier and potentially problematic. This paper focuses on the analysis of the politics of social filtering through social network sites. It argues that what is needed is both a closer examination and evaluation of these processes and also the development of a framework through which to begin such an evaluation. There is also a second intent: to (re)assert the argument that any analysis necessarily needs to take into account and critique the development, implementation and use of technologies (this includes the software, algorithms and code)themselves as well as the people that build and use them

Architectural Vulnerabilities in Plug-and-Play Systems

Plug-and-play architectures enhance systems’ extensibility by providing a framework that enables additional functionalities to be added or removed from the system at their runtime. Such frameworks are often implemented through a set of well-defined interfaces that form the extension points for the pluggable functionalities. However, the plug-ins can increase the applications attack surface or introduce untrusted behavior into the system. Designing a secure plug-and-play architecture is critical and non-trivial as the features provided by plug-ins are not known in advance. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth study of seven systems with plug-and-play architectures. In total, we have analyzed 3,183 vulnerabilities from Chromium, Thunderbird, Firefox, Pidgin, WordPress, Apache OfBiz, and OpenMRS whose core architecture is based on a plug-and-play approach. We have also identified the common security vulnerabilities related to the plug-and-play architectures, and mechanisms to mitigate them by following a grounded theory approach. We found a total of 303 vulnerabilities that are rooted in extensibility design decisions. We also observed that these plugin-related vulnerabilities were caused by 15 different types of problems. We present these 15 types of security issues observed in the case studies and the design mechanisms that could prevent such vulnerabilities. Finally, as a result of this study, we have used formal modeling in order to guide developers of plug and play systems in verifying that their architectures are free of many of these types of security issues

TOWARD SYMBIOTIC HUMAN-AI INTERACTION FOCUSING ON PROGRAMMING BY EXAMPLE

Programming has become a new literacy, but is still inaccessible to ordinary people. Programming-by-example (PBE) is an alternative approach that allows people to teach computers repetitive tasks by demonstrating couple input and output examples of the tasks. While the advancements of PBE have been mainly driven by algorithmic improvements, a growing community of researchers started realizing the importance of issues on the human side of PBE. For instance, inexperienced users often find it hard to provide complete and consistent examples, which is crucial for computers to learn the correct programs. Unfortunately, most PBE systems have limited ways to communicate with users about what it can or cannot do, and how to handle unsuccessful situations. The lack of symbiotic interaction between human users and PBE engines remain as a major hurdle against a widespread adoption of PBE techniques. To address the issues on the human side of PBE, this dissertation has four research threads. First, we began with two formative studies to establish a better understanding of inexperienced users' needs and mental models. Second, based on the findings of the formative studies, we developed a Visual Environment for Symbiotic Programming, called VESPY. VESPY interleaves visual programming and PBE techniques, enabling users (1) to decompose complex tasks into small modules on its 2-d grid, and (2) to complete each module by providing input and output examples. Four sample programs demonstrate VESPY's remarkable versatility. However, we also noticed that VESPY still had a number of usability issues. Third, to better understand the usability issues and how to help users out from common mistakes, we conducted an online user study that observed how inexperience users perform program decomposition and disambiguation, which are the two core activities of PBE. We identified seven types of mistakes, and reaffirmed that informative feedback on those mistakes is crucial for designing usable systems. Finally, we explored the design space of feedback components, in order to understand their impact on user's experience. My dissertation contributes to the AI and HCI communities with: (i) identification of unmet needs of end-users of the Web; (ii) characterization of non-programmers’ mental model; (iii) design process of interleaving visual programming and PBE; (iv) identification of mistakes people make while using PBE; and (v) design and assessment of feedback components for PBE users

Semi-automatic wrapper generation for semi-structured websites

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-74).Many information sources on the Web are semi-structured; hence there is an opportunity for automatic tools to process and extract their information for easy access through a uniform interface language. Wrapper generation is the creation of wrappers which contains scripts that extract and integrate data from data sources, mostly from Web data sources due to the large amount of data available on the World Wide Web. Despite ongoing efforts to automate the process of wrapper generation, wrappers frequently break due to formatting and layout changes in data sources. This thesis presents Wrapster, a new system that semi-automatically generates wrappers for semi-structured Web sources, improves wrapper robustness, and eliminates the need for programming skills and, to a large extent, the process of script creation. Wrapster's novel component is the repairing module that constantly checks if any wrapper script has failed and repairs the failing wrapper's script using stored extracted instances. In addition, Wrapster provides an interactive Web user interface to control the wrapper generation process, edit the generated wrappers, and test their scripts. Wrapster is being tested on the START Question Answering system; however, it is a generic tool to be used by any QA system that uses the Web as its knowledge base.by Gabriel Zaccak.S.M

SWAT

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, February 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 52-54).This thesis introduces the Stateful Web Augmentation Toolkit (SWAT), a toolkit that gives users control over the presentation and functionality of web content. SWAT extends Chickenfoot, a Firefox browser scripting environment that offers a variety of automation and manipulation capabilities. SWAT allows programmers to identify data records in database-backed web sites. Records are nodes of data corresponding to rows in the database backend. Programmers can append additional functionality to those nodes, and the resulting code can be bundled up and installed by users without technical expertise. SWAT consists of three modules: a Site Profile module that identifies data records, a Tweak module that defines the look and behavior of an interactive widget, and a Storage module that persists the widget state across pages and browser sessions. Default implementations are provided for each module, and these implementations adhere to an API that encompasses all communication between modules. A programmer can extend or replace any module to improve a system built with SWAT. With SWAT, end users can customize sites far beyond where their content providers stopped, and can add functionality that logically connects different data sources, changes how and where data is stored, and redefines how they interact with the web.by Matthew J. Webber.M.Eng

OpenNym: privacy preserving recommending via pseudonymous group authentication

A user accessing an online recommender system typically has two choices: either agree to be uniquely identified and in return receive a personalized and rich experience, or try to use the service anonymously but receive a degraded non-personalized service. In this paper, we offer a third option to this “all or nothing” paradigm, namely use a web service with a public group identity, that we refer to as an OpenNym identity, which provides users with a degree of anonymity while still allowing useful personalization of the web service. Our approach can be implemented as a browser shim that is backward compatible with existing services and as an example, we demonstrate operation with the Movielens online service. We exploit the fact that users can often be clustered into groups having similar preferences and in this way, increased privacy need not come at the cost of degraded service. Indeed use of the OpenNym approach with Movielens improves personalization performance

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Mobile 2D and 3D Spatial Query Techniques for the Geospatial Web

The increasing availability of abundant geographically referenced information in the Geospatial Web provides a variety of opportunities for developing value-added LBS applications. However, large data volumes of the Geospatial Web and small mobile device displays impose a data visualization problem, as the amount of searchable information overwhelms the display when too many query results are returned. Excessive returned results clutter the mobile display, making it harder for users to prioritize information and causes confusion and usability problems. Mobile Spatial Interaction (MSI) research into this “information overload” problem is ongoing where map personalization and other semantic based filtering mechanisms are essential to de-clutter and adapt the exploration of the real-world to the processing/display limitations of mobile devices. In this thesis, we propose that another way to filter this information is to intelligently refine the search space. 3DQ (3-Dimensional Query) is our novel MSI prototype for information discovery on today’s location and orientation-aware smartphones within 3D Geospatial Web environments. Our application incorporates human interactions (interpreted from embedded sensors) in the geospatial query process by determining the shape of their actual visibility space as a query “window” in a spatial database, e.g. Isovist in 2D and Threat Dome in 3D. This effectively applies hidden query removal (HQR) functionality in 360º 3D that takes into account both the horizontal and vertical dimensions when calculating the 3D search space, significantly reducing display clutter and information overload on mobile devices. The effect is a more accurate and expected search result for mobile LBS applications by returning information on only those objects visible within a user’s 3D field-of-view