Evaluating the Provision of Botnet Defences using Translational Research Concepts.

Botnet research frequently draws on concepts from other fields. An example is the use of epidemiological models when studying botnet propagation, which facilitate an understanding of bot spread dynamics and the exploration of behavioural theory. Whilst the literature is rich with these models, it is lacking in work aimed at connecting the insights of theoretical research with day-to-day practice. To address this, we look at botnets through the lens of implementation science, a discipline from the field of translational research in health care, which is designed to evaluate the implementation process. In this paper, we explore key concepts of implementation science, and propose a framework-based approach to improve the provision of security measures to network entities. We demonstrate the approach using existing propagation models, and discuss the role of implementation science in malware defence

Latent Space Model for Multi-Modal Social Data

With the emergence of social networking services, researchers enjoy the increasing availability of large-scale heterogenous datasets capturing online user interactions and behaviors. Traditional analysis of techno-social systems data has focused mainly on describing either the dynamics of social interactions, or the attributes and behaviors of the users. However, overwhelming empirical evidence suggests that the two dimensions affect one another, and therefore they should be jointly modeled and analyzed in a multi-modal framework. The benefits of such an approach include the ability to build better predictive models, leveraging social network information as well as user behavioral signals. To this purpose, here we propose the Constrained Latent Space Model (CLSM), a generalized framework that combines Mixed Membership Stochastic Blockmodels (MMSB) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) incorporating a constraint that forces the latent space to concurrently describe the multiple data modalities. We derive an efficient inference algorithm based on Variational Expectation Maximization that has a computational cost linear in the size of the network, thus making it feasible to analyze massive social datasets. We validate the proposed framework on two problems: prediction of social interactions from user attributes and behaviors, and behavior prediction exploiting network information. We perform experiments with a variety of multi-modal social systems, spanning location-based social networks (Gowalla), social media services (Instagram, Orkut), e-commerce and review sites (Amazon, Ciao), and finally citation networks (Cora). The results indicate significant improvement in prediction accuracy over state of the art methods, and demonstrate the flexibility of the proposed approach for addressing a variety of different learning problems commonly occurring with multi-modal social data.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, 2 table

Modelling Agents Cooperation Through Internal Visions of Social Network and Episodic Memory

Human societies appear in many types of simulations. Particularly, a lot of new computer games contain a virtual world that imitates the real world. A few of the most important and the most difficult society elements to be modelled are the social context and individuals cooperation. In this paper we show how the social context and cooperation ability can be provided using agents that are equipped with internal visions of mutual social relations. Internal vision is a representation of social relations from the agent's point of view so, due to being subjective, it may be inconsistent with the reality. We introduce the agent model and the mechanism of rebuilding the agent's internal vision that is similar to that used by humans. An experimental proof of concept implementation is also presented

INDIGO: a generalized model and framework for performance prediction of data dissemination

According to recent studies, an enormous rise in location-based mobile services is expected in future. People are interested in getting and acting on the localized information retrieved from their vicinity like local events, shopping offers, local food, etc. These studies also suggested that local businesses intend to maximize the reach of their localized offers/advertisements by pushing them to the maxi- mum number of interested people. The scope of such localized services can be augmented by leveraging the capabilities of smartphones through the dissemination of such information to other interested people. To enable local businesses (or publishers) of localized services to take in- formed decision and assess the performance of their dissemination-based localized services in advance, we need to predict the performance of data dissemination in complex real-world scenarios. Some of the questions relevant to publishers could be the maximum time required to disseminate information, best relays to maximize information dissemination etc. This thesis addresses these questions and provides a solution called INDIGO that enables the prediction of data dissemination performance based on the availability of physical and social proximity information among people by collectively considering different real-world aspects of data dissemination process. INDIGO empowers publishers to assess the performance of their localized dissemination based services in advance both in physical as well as the online social world. It provides a solution called INDIGO–Physical for the cases where physical proximity plays the fundamental role and enables the tighter prediction of data dissemination time and prediction of best relays under real-world mobility, communication and data dissemination strategy aspects. Further, this thesis also contributes in providing the performance prediction of data dissemination in large-scale online social networks where the social proximity is prominent using INDIGO–OSN part of the INDIGO framework under different real-world dissemination aspects like heterogeneous activity of users, type of information that needs to be disseminated, friendship ties and the content of the published online activities. INDIGO is the first work that provides a set of solutions and enables publishers to predict the performance of their localized dissemination based services based on the availability of physical and social proximity information among people and different real-world aspects of data dissemination process in both physical and online social networks. INDIGO outperforms the existing works for physical proximity by providing 5 times tighter upper bound of data dissemination time under real-world data dissemination aspects. Further, for social proximity, INDIGO is able to predict the data dissemination with 90% accuracy and differently, from other works, it also provides the trade-off between high prediction accuracy and privacy by introducing the feature planes from an online social networks

A Human-Centric Approach to Group-Based Context-Awareness

The emerging need for qualitative approaches in context-aware information processing calls for proper modeling of context information and efficient handling of its inherent uncertainty resulted from human interpretation and usage. Many of the current approaches to context-awareness either lack a solid theoretical basis for modeling or ignore important requirements such as modularity, high-order uncertainty management and group-based context-awareness. Therefore, their real-world application and extendability remains limited. In this paper, we present f-Context as a service-based context-awareness framework, based on language-action perspective (LAP) theory for modeling. Then we identify some of the complex, informational parts of context which contain high-order uncertainties due to differences between members of the group in defining them. An agent-based perceptual computer architecture is proposed for implementing f-Context that uses computing with words (CWW) for handling uncertainty. The feasibility of f-Context is analyzed using a realistic scenario involving a group of mobile users. We believe that the proposed approach can open the door to future research on context-awareness by offering a theoretical foundation based on human communication, and a service-based layered architecture which exploits CWW for context-aware, group-based and platform-independent access to information systems

Toward Point-of-Interest Recommendation Systems: A Critical Review on Deep-Learning Approaches

In recent years, location-based social networks (LBSNs) that allow members to share their location and provide related services, and point-of-interest (POIs) recommendations which suggest attractive places to visit, have become noteworthy and useful for users, research areas, industries, and advertising companies. The POI recommendation system combines different information sources and creates numerous research challenges and questions. New research in this field utilizes deep-learning techniques as a solution to the issues because it has the ability to represent the nonlinear relationship between users and items more effectively than other methods. Despite all the obvious improvements that have been made recently, this field still does not have an updated and integrated view of the types of methods, their limitations, features, and future prospects. This paper provides a systematic review focusing on recent research on this topic. First, this approach prepares an overall view of the types of recommendation methods, their challenges, and the various influencing factors that can improve model performance in POI recommendations, then it reviews the traditional machine-learning methods and deep-learning techniques employed in the POI recommendation and analyzes their strengths and weaknesses. The recently proposed models are categorized according to the method used, the dataset, and the evaluation metrics. It found that these articles give priority to accuracy in comparison with other dimensions of quality. Finally, this approach introduces the research trends and future orientations, and it realizes that POI recommender systems based on deep learning are a promising future work

Layered Interoperability for Collaborative IoT Applications

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