98,296 research outputs found
Predicting Interests of People on Online Social Networks
We introduce a new data set which contains both a self-declared friendship network and self-chosen attributes from a finite list defined by the social networking site. We propose Gaussian Field Harmonic Functions (GFHF), a state-of-the-art graph transduction algorithm, as a novel way of testing the relevance of the friendship network for predicting individual attributes. We show that the underlying self-declared friendship network allows us to predict some but not all attributes. We use Support Vector Machines (SVM) in conjunction with GFHF to show that other attributes such as age or languages spoken are also important
POISED: Spotting Twitter Spam Off the Beaten Paths
Cybercriminals have found in online social networks a propitious medium to
spread spam and malicious content. Existing techniques for detecting spam
include predicting the trustworthiness of accounts and analyzing the content of
these messages. However, advanced attackers can still successfully evade these
defenses.
Online social networks bring people who have personal connections or share
common interests to form communities. In this paper, we first show that users
within a networked community share some topics of interest. Moreover, content
shared on these social network tend to propagate according to the interests of
people. Dissemination paths may emerge where some communities post similar
messages, based on the interests of those communities. Spam and other malicious
content, on the other hand, follow different spreading patterns.
In this paper, we follow this insight and present POISED, a system that
leverages the differences in propagation between benign and malicious messages
on social networks to identify spam and other unwanted content. We test our
system on a dataset of 1.3M tweets collected from 64K users, and we show that
our approach is effective in detecting malicious messages, reaching 91%
precision and 93% recall. We also show that POISED's detection is more
comprehensive than previous systems, by comparing it to three state-of-the-art
spam detection systems that have been proposed by the research community in the
past. POISED significantly outperforms each of these systems. Moreover, through
simulations, we show how POISED is effective in the early detection of spam
messages and how it is resilient against two well-known adversarial machine
learning attacks
Utilizing Online Social Network and Location-Based Data to Recommend Products and Categories in Online Marketplaces
Recent research has unveiled the importance of online social networks for
improving the quality of recommender systems and encouraged the research
community to investigate better ways of exploiting the social information for
recommendations. To contribute to this sparse field of research, in this paper
we exploit users' interactions along three data sources (marketplace, social
network and location-based) to assess their performance in a barely studied
domain: recommending products and domains of interests (i.e., product
categories) to people in an online marketplace environment. To that end we
defined sets of content- and network-based user similarity features for each
data source and studied them isolated using an user-based Collaborative
Filtering (CF) approach and in combination via a hybrid recommender algorithm,
to assess which one provides the best recommendation performance.
Interestingly, in our experiments conducted on a rich dataset collected from
SecondLife, a popular online virtual world, we found that recommenders relying
on user similarity features obtained from the social network data clearly
yielded the best results in terms of accuracy in case of predicting products,
whereas the features obtained from the marketplace and location-based data
sources also obtained very good results in case of predicting categories. This
finding indicates that all three types of data sources are important and should
be taken into account depending on the level of specialization of the
recommendation task.Comment: 20 pages book chapte
On the Interplay between Social and Topical Structure
People's interests and people's social relationships are intuitively
connected, but understanding their interplay and whether they can help predict
each other has remained an open question. We examine the interface of two
decisive structures forming the backbone of online social media: the graph
structure of social networks - who connects with whom - and the set structure
of topical affiliations - who is interested in what. In studying this
interface, we identify key relationships whereby each of these structures can
be understood in terms of the other. The context for our analysis is Twitter, a
complex social network of both follower relationships and communication
relationships. On Twitter, "hashtags" are used to label conversation topics,
and we examine hashtag usage alongside these social structures.
We find that the hashtags that users adopt can predict their social
relationships, and also that the social relationships between the initial
adopters of a hashtag can predict the future popularity of that hashtag. By
studying weighted social relationships, we observe that while strong
reciprocated ties are the easiest to predict from hashtag structure, they are
also much less useful than weak directed ties for predicting hashtag
popularity. Importantly, we show that computationally simple structural
determinants can provide remarkable performance in both tasks. While our
analyses focus on Twitter, we view our findings as broadly applicable to
topical affiliations and social relationships in a host of diverse contexts,
including the movies people watch, the brands people like, or the locations
people frequent.Comment: 11 page
What makes people bond?: A study on social interactions and common life points on Facebook
In this paper we aim at understanding if and how, by analysing people's
profile and historical data (such as data available on Facebook profiles and
interactions, or collected explicitly) we can motivate two persons to interact
and eventually create long-term bonds. We do this by exploring the relationship
between connectedness, social interactions and common life points on Facebook.
The results are of particular importance for the development of technology that
aims at reducing social isolation for people with less chances to interact,
such as older adults
Studying and Modeling the Connection between People's Preferences and Content Sharing
People regularly share items using online social media. However, people's
decisions around sharing---who shares what to whom and why---are not well
understood. We present a user study involving 87 pairs of Facebook users to
understand how people make their sharing decisions. We find that even when
sharing to a specific individual, people's own preference for an item
(individuation) dominates over the recipient's preferences (altruism). People's
open-ended responses about how they share, however, indicate that they do try
to personalize shares based on the recipient. To explain these contrasting
results, we propose a novel process model of sharing that takes into account
people's preferences and the salience of an item. We also present encouraging
results for a sharing prediction model that incorporates both the senders' and
the recipients' preferences. These results suggest improvements to both
algorithms that support sharing in social media and to information diffusion
models.Comment: CSCW 201
Topicality and Social Impact: Diverse Messages but Focused Messengers
Are users who comment on a variety of matters more likely to achieve high
influence than those who delve into one focused field? Do general Twitter
hashtags, such as #lol, tend to be more popular than novel ones, such as
#instantlyinlove? Questions like these demand a way to detect topics hidden
behind messages associated with an individual or a hashtag, and a gauge of
similarity among these topics. Here we develop such an approach to identify
clusters of similar hashtags by detecting communities in the hashtag
co-occurrence network. Then the topical diversity of a user's interests is
quantified by the entropy of her hashtags across different topic clusters. A
similar measure is applied to hashtags, based on co-occurring tags. We find
that high topical diversity of early adopters or co-occurring tags implies high
future popularity of hashtags. In contrast, low diversity helps an individual
accumulate social influence. In short, diverse messages and focused messengers
are more likely to gain impact.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, 6 table
Towards Psychometrics-based Friend Recommendations in Social Networking Services
Two of the defining elements of Social Networking Services are the social
profile, containing information about the user, and the social graph,
containing information about the connections between users. Social Networking
Services are used to connect to known people as well as to discover new
contacts. Current friend recommendation mechanisms typically utilize the social
graph. In this paper, we argue that psychometrics, the field of measuring
personality traits, can help make meaningful friend recommendations based on an
extended social profile containing collected smartphone sensor data. This will
support the development of highly distributed Social Networking Services
without central knowledge of the social graph.Comment: Accepted for publication at the 2017 International Conference on AI &
Mobile Services (IEEE AIMS
Predicting Successful Memes using Network and Community Structure
We investigate the predictability of successful memes using their early
spreading patterns in the underlying social networks. We propose and analyze a
comprehensive set of features and develop an accurate model to predict future
popularity of a meme given its early spreading patterns. Our paper provides the
first comprehensive comparison of existing predictive frameworks. We categorize
our features into three groups: influence of early adopters, community
concentration, and characteristics of adoption time series. We find that
features based on community structure are the most powerful predictors of
future success. We also find that early popularity of a meme is not a good
predictor of its future popularity, contrary to common belief. Our methods
outperform other approaches, particularly in the task of detecting very popular
or unpopular memes.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables. Proceedings of 8th AAAI Intl. Conf. on
Weblogs and social media (ICWSM 2014
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