100,424 research outputs found
Applications of Structural Balance in Signed Social Networks
We present measures, models and link prediction algorithms based on the
structural balance in signed social networks. Certain social networks contain,
in addition to the usual 'friend' links, 'enemy' links. These networks are
called signed social networks. A classical and major concept for signed social
networks is that of structural balance, i.e., the tendency of triangles to be
'balanced' towards including an even number of negative edges, such as
friend-friend-friend and friend-enemy-enemy triangles. In this article, we
introduce several new signed network analysis methods that exploit structural
balance for measuring partial balance, for finding communities of people based
on balance, for drawing signed social networks, and for solving the problem of
link prediction. Notably, the introduced methods are based on the signed graph
Laplacian and on the concept of signed resistance distances. We evaluate our
methods on a collection of four signed social network datasets.Comment: 37 page
FastPay: High-Performance Byzantine Fault Tolerant Settlement
FastPay allows a set of distributed authorities, some of which are Byzantine,
to maintain a high-integrity and availability settlement system for pre-funded
payments. It can be used to settle payments in a native unit of value
(crypto-currency), or as a financial side-infrastructure to support retail
payments in fiat currencies. FastPay is based on Byzantine Consistent Broadcast
as its core primitive, foregoing the expenses of full atomic commit channels
(consensus). The resulting system has low-latency for both confirmation and
payment finality. Remarkably, each authority can be sharded across many
machines to allow unbounded horizontal scalability. Our experiments demonstrate
intra-continental confirmation latency of less than 100ms, making FastPay
applicable to point of sale payments. In laboratory environments, we achieve
over 80,000 transactions per second with 20 authorities---surpassing the
requirements of current retail card payment networks, while significantly
increasing their robustness
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