Analyzing the Facebook Friendship Graph

Online Social Networks (OSN) during last years acquired a\ud huge and increasing popularity as one of the most important emerging Web phenomena, deeply modifying the behavior of users and contributing to build a solid substrate of connections and relationships among people using the Web. In this preliminary work paper, our purpose is to analyze Facebook, considering a signi�cant sample of data re\ud ecting relationships among subscribed users. Our goal is to extract, from this platform, relevant information about the distribution of these relations and exploit tools and algorithms provided by the Social Network Analysis (SNA) to discover and, possibly, understand underlying similarities\ud between the developing of OSN and real-life social networks

An automated Model-based Testing Approach in Software Product Lines Using a Variability Language.

This paper presents the application of an automated testing approach for Software Product Lines (SPL) driven by its state-machine and variability models. Context: Model-based testing provides a technique for automatic generation of test cases using models. Introduction of a variability model in this technique can achieve testing automation in SPL. Method: We use UML and CVL (Common Variability Language) models as input, and JUnit test cases are derived from these models. This approach has been implemented using the UML2 Eclipse Modeling platform and the CVL-Tool. Validation: A model checking tool prototype has been developed and a case study has been performed. Conclusions: Preliminary experiments have proved that our approach can find structural errors in the SPL under test. In our future work we will introduce Object Constraint Language (OCL) constraints attached to the input UML mode

Crawling Facebook for Social Network Analysis Purposes

We describe our work in the collection and analysis of massive data describing the connections between participants to online social networks. Alternative approaches to social network data collection are defined and evaluated in practice, against the popular Facebook Web site. Thanks to our ad-hoc, privacy-compliant crawlers, two large samples, comprising millions of connections, have been collected; the data is anonymous and organized as an undirected graph. We describe a set of tools that we developed to analyze specific properties of such social-network graphs, i.e., among others, degree distribution, centrality measures, scaling laws and distribution of friendship.\u

CellH5: a format for data exchange in high-content screening

Summary: High-throughput microscopy data require a diversity of analytical approaches. However, the construction of workflows that use algorithms from different software packages is difficult owing to a lack of interoperability. To overcome this limitation, we present CellH5, an HDF5 data format for cell-based assays in high-throughput microscopy, which stores high-dimensional image data along with inter-object relations in graphs. CellH5Browser, an interactive gallery image browser, demonstrates the versatility and performance of the file format on live imaging data of dividing human cells. CellH5 provides new opportunities for integrated data analysis by multiple software platforms. Availability: Source code is freely available at www.github.com/cellh5 under the GPL license and at www.bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/rhdf5.html under the Artistic-2.0 license. Demo datasets and the CellH5Browser are available at www.cellh5.org. A Fiji importer for cellh5 will be released soon. Contact: [email protected] or [email protected] Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics onlin

A New Tool for Rectangular Dualization

OcORD is a software tool for rectangular dualization. Rectangular dualization is a dual representation of a plane graph introduced in the early seventies. It proved to be effective in applications such as architectural space planning and VLSI floorplanning. However, not all plane graphs admit a rectangular dual, which imposes severe limitations on its use in other applications. OcORD aims at freeing rectangular dualization from such restrictions and proving its effectiveness in graph visualization. This is achieved in two ways. Firstly, OcORD features a new linear-time algorithm creating a rectangular dual of any plane graph. Secondly, it shows how nice drawings of a graph can be easily obtained from its rectangular dual. Finally, the automatic generation of a Virtual World through rectangular dualization is described. [DOI: 10.1685/CSC09301] About DO

Graph Layout Performance Comparisons of Force-Directed Algorithms

© 2018 Totem Publisher, Inc. All rights reserved. Due to force-directed algorithms’ capabilities of producing aesthetically pleasing graph layouts, which follow metrics for graph drawing aesthetics, these layouts have become the most common methods in the practical data visualization area. However, evaluating the performance of relevant algorithms remains a challenge, since graph layout quality is largely relying on aspects such as human intuition, personal judgment and methods’ pre-setting parameters. In addition, most aesthetics criteria of graph drawing conflict with each other. This study evaluated the performance measurements of four force-directed algorithms in terms of seven commonly applied aesthetic criteria based on practical raw data collected, and demonstrated the experimental framework. The early outcomes compared twenty final graph layouts and gave empirical evidences; the study may assist with future detailed force-directed algorithms selection based on users’ specific requirements

NETEMBED: A Network Resource Mapping Service for Distributed Applications

Emerging configurable infrastructures such as large-scale overlays and grids, distributed testbeds, and sensor networks comprise diverse sets of available computing resources (e.g., CPU and OS capabilities and memory constraints) and network conditions (e.g., link delay, bandwidth, loss rate, and jitter) whose characteristics are both complex and time-varying. At the same time, distributed applications to be deployed on these infrastructures exhibit increasingly complex constraints and requirements on resources they wish to utilize. Examples include selecting nodes and links to schedule an overlay multicast file transfer across the Grid, or embedding a network experiment with specific resource constraints in a distributed testbed such as PlanetLab. Thus, a common problem facing the efficient deployment of distributed applications on these infrastructures is that of "mapping" application-level requirements onto the network in such a manner that the requirements of the application are realized, assuming that the underlying characteristics of the network are known. We refer to this problem as the network embedding problem. In this paper, we propose a new approach to tackle this combinatorially-hard problem. Thanks to a number of heuristics, our approach greatly improves performance and scalability over previously existing techniques. It does so by pruning large portions of the search space without overlooking any valid embedding. We present a construction that allows a compact representation of candidate embeddings, which is maintained by carefully controlling the order via which candidate mappings are inserted and invalid mappings are removed. We present an implementation of our proposed technique, which we call NETEMBED – a service that identify feasible mappings of a virtual network configuration (the query network) to an existing real infrastructure or testbed (the hosting network). We present results of extensive performance evaluation experiments of NETEMBED using several combinations of real and synthetic network topologies. Our results show that our NETEMBED service is quite effective in identifying one (or all) possible embeddings for quite sizable queries and hosting networks – much larger than what any of the existing techniques or services are able to handle.National Science Foundation (CNS Cybertrust 0524477, NSF CNS NeTS 0520166, NSF CNS ITR 0205294, EIA RI 0202067