A Prototype For Learning Privacy-Preserving Data Publising

Erinevad organisatsioonid, valitsusasutused, firmad ja üksikisikud koguvad andmeid, mida on võimalik hiljem uute teadmiste saamiseks andmekaeve meetoditega töödelda. Töötlejaks ei tarvitse olla andmete koguja. Sageli ei ole teada andmetöötleja usaldusväärsus, mistõttu on oluline tagada, et avalikustatud andmetest poleks enam võimalik tagantjärgi privaatseid isikuandmeid identifitseerida. Selleks, et isikuid ei oleks enam võimalik identifitseerida, tuleb enne andmete töötlejatele väljastamist rakendada privaatsust säilitavaid meetodeid. Käesolevas lõputöös kirjeldatakse erinevaid ohte privaatsusele, meetodeid nende ohtude ennetamiseks, võrreldakse neid meetodeid omavahel ja kirjeldatakse erinevaid viise, kuidas andmeidanonümiseerida. Lõputöö teiseks väljundiks on õpitarkvara, mis võimaldabtudengitel antud valdkonnaga tutvuda. Lõputöö viimases osas valideeritakse loodud tarkvara.Our data gets collected every day by governments and different organizations for data mining. It is often not known who the receiving part of data is and whether data receiver can be trusted. Therefore it is necessary to anonymize data in a way what it would be not possible to identify persons from released data sets. This master thesis will discuss different threats to privacy, discuss and compare different privacy-preserving methods to mitigate these threats. The thesis will give an overview of different possible implementations for these privacy-preserving methods. The other output of this thesis is educational purpose software that allows students to learn and practice privacy-preserving methods. The final part of this thesis is a validation of designed software

Adaptability, Cooperation and Reconfiguration in Very Complex Multiregional Network Organizations

There seems to be a general trend that the development of technologies which interact with human beings also enhances the knowledge of human functions. For example, with the development of color television systems progress in the knowledge of human color vision was also recorded. In return this new knowledge then helped in the design of even more efficient color television system. A similar situation seems to reign in computer systems and computer networks. Managing different resources in computer systems by operational systems resembles somewhat the management of resources in an organization. The inference block in 5th generation computers may resemble human inference and is pursued by an artificial intelligence discipline. The study of cooperative features in computer systems and networks may bring us closer to understanding these processes in organizations or even in human societies at large. This happens because many causal relations are present in computer systems in clearer and sometimes more primitive forms, stripped of many of the accompanying but irrelevant (emotional) ingredients. This Collaborative Paper is the continuation of an activity that started when Dr. Cifersky joined the Management and Technology Area of IIASA in 1882 as a participant in the Young Scientists Summer Program, under the supervision of Dr. R. Lee. The paper scans those problems in organizations which are evoked by the environment. It attempts to describe some of those processes which are taking place in complex organizations as a response to external influences, and identifies some of the impacts this may have on the organization's performance objectives. The paper has not been edited and supplemented by a vocabulary, therefore it does not make easy reading. It uses terms common in organization research, computer systems (for example, communication protocol), or principles used in fail-safe computer systems (reconfiguration). The topic is interesting and stimulating and can contribute to further research at the Institute in this field

Multilayer Networks

In most natural and engineered systems, a set of entities interact with each other in complicated patterns that can encompass multiple types of relationships, change in time, and include other types of complications. Such systems include multiple subsystems and layers of connectivity, and it is important to take such "multilayer" features into account to try to improve our understanding of complex systems. Consequently, it is necessary to generalize "traditional" network theory by developing (and validating) a framework and associated tools to study multilayer systems in a comprehensive fashion. The origins of such efforts date back several decades and arose in multiple disciplines, and now the study of multilayer networks has become one of the most important directions in network science. In this paper, we discuss the history of multilayer networks (and related concepts) and review the exploding body of work on such networks. To unify the disparate terminology in the large body of recent work, we discuss a general framework for multilayer networks, construct a dictionary of terminology to relate the numerous existing concepts to each other, and provide a thorough discussion that compares, contrasts, and translates between related notions such as multilayer networks, multiplex networks, interdependent networks, networks of networks, and many others. We also survey and discuss existing data sets that can be represented as multilayer networks. We review attempts to generalize single-layer-network diagnostics to multilayer networks. We also discuss the rapidly expanding research on multilayer-network models and notions like community structure, connected components, tensor decompositions, and various types of dynamical processes on multilayer networks. We conclude with a summary and an outlook.Comment: Working paper; 59 pages, 8 figure

Ideological and Temporal Components of Network Polarization in Online Political Participatory Media

Political polarization is traditionally analyzed through the ideological stances of groups and parties, but it also has a behavioral component that manifests in the interactions between individuals. We present an empirical analysis of the digital traces of politicians in politnetz.ch, a Swiss online platform focused on political activity, in which politicians interact by creating support links, comments, and likes. We analyze network polarization as the level of intra- party cohesion with respect to inter-party connectivity, finding that supports show a very strongly polarized structure with respect to party alignment. The analysis of this multiplex network shows that each layer of interaction contains relevant information, where comment groups follow topics related to Swiss politics. Our analysis reveals that polarization in the layer of likes evolves in time, increasing close to the federal elections of 2011. Furthermore, we analyze the internal social network of each party through metrics related to hierarchical structures, information efficiency, and social resilience. Our results suggest that the online social structure of a party is related to its ideology, and reveal that the degree of connectivity across two parties increases when they are close in the ideological space of a multi-party system.Comment: 35 pages, 11 figures, Internet, Policy & Politics Conference, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, 25-26 September 201

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

Zero-Truncated Poisson Tensor Factorization for Massive Binary Tensors

We present a scalable Bayesian model for low-rank factorization of massive tensors with binary observations. The proposed model has the following key properties: (1) in contrast to the models based on the logistic or probit likelihood, using a zero-truncated Poisson likelihood for binary data allows our model to scale up in the number of \emph{ones} in the tensor, which is especially appealing for massive but sparse binary tensors; (2) side-information in form of binary pairwise relationships (e.g., an adjacency network) between objects in any tensor mode can also be leveraged, which can be especially useful in "cold-start" settings; and (3) the model admits simple Bayesian inference via batch, as well as \emph{online} MCMC; the latter allows scaling up even for \emph{dense} binary data (i.e., when the number of ones in the tensor/network is also massive). In addition, non-negative factor matrices in our model provide easy interpretability, and the tensor rank can be inferred from the data. We evaluate our model on several large-scale real-world binary tensors, achieving excellent computational scalability, and also demonstrate its usefulness in leveraging side-information provided in form of mode-network(s).Comment: UAI (Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence) 201

Negative emotions boost users activity at BBC Forum

We present an empirical study of user activity in online BBC discussion forums, measured by the number of posts written by individual debaters and the average sentiment of these posts. Nearly 2.5 million posts from over 18 thousand users were investigated. Scale free distributions were observed for activity in individual discussion threads as well as for overall activity. The number of unique users in a thread normalized by the thread length decays with thread length, suggesting that thread life is sustained by mutual discussions rather than by independent comments. Automatic sentiment analysis shows that most posts contain negative emotions and the most active users in individual threads express predominantly negative sentiments. It follows that the average emotion of longer threads is more negative and that threads can be sustained by negative comments. An agent based computer simulation model has been used to reproduce several essential characteristics of the analyzed system. The model stresses the role of discussions between users, especially emotionally laden quarrels between supporters of opposite opinions, and represents many observed statistics of the forum.Comment: 29 pages, 6 figure

Deductive and Inductive Stream Reasoning for Semantic Social Media Analytics

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