5,118 research outputs found
Extraction and Analysis of Facebook Friendship Relations
Online Social Networks (OSNs) are a unique Web and social phenomenon, affecting tastes and behaviors of their users and helping them to maintain/create friendships. It is interesting to analyze the growth and evolution of Online Social Networks both from the point of view of marketing and other of new services and from a scientific viewpoint, since their structure and evolution may share similarities with real-life social networks. In social sciences, several techniques for analyzing (online) social networks have been developed, to evaluate quantitative properties (e.g., defining metrics and measures of structural characteristics of the networks) or qualitative aspects (e.g., studying the attachment model for the network evolution, the binary trust relationships, and the link prediction problem).\ud
However, OSN analysis poses novel challenges both to Computer and Social scientists. We present our long-term research effort in analyzing Facebook, the largest and arguably most successful OSN today: it gathers more than 500 million users. Access to data about Facebook users and their friendship relations, is restricted; thus, we acquired the necessary information directly from the front-end of the Web site, in order to reconstruct a sub-graph representing anonymous interconnections among a significant subset of users. We describe our ad-hoc, privacy-compliant crawler for Facebook data extraction. To minimize bias, we adopt two different graph mining techniques: breadth-first search (BFS) and rejection sampling. To analyze the structural properties of samples consisting of millions of nodes, we developed a specific tool for analyzing quantitative and qualitative properties of social networks, adopting and improving existing Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques and algorithms
Exploiting multimedia in creating and analysing multimedia Web archives
The data contained on the web and the social web are inherently multimedia and consist of a mixture of textual, visual and audio modalities. Community memories embodied on the web and social web contain a rich mixture of data from these modalities. In many ways, the web is the greatest resource ever created by human-kind. However, due to the dynamic and distributed nature of the web, its content changes, appears and disappears on a daily basis. Web archiving provides a way of capturing snapshots of (parts of) the web for preservation and future analysis. This paper provides an overview of techniques we have developed within the context of the EU funded ARCOMEM (ARchiving COmmunity MEMories) project to allow multimedia web content to be leveraged during the archival process and for post-archival analysis. Through a set of use cases, we explore several practical applications of multimedia analytics within the realm of web archiving, web archive analysis and multimedia data on the web in general
Social Turing Tests: Crowdsourcing Sybil Detection
As popular tools for spreading spam and malware, Sybils (or fake accounts)
pose a serious threat to online communities such as Online Social Networks
(OSNs). Today, sophisticated attackers are creating realistic Sybils that
effectively befriend legitimate users, rendering most automated Sybil detection
techniques ineffective. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of a
crowdsourced Sybil detection system for OSNs. We conduct a large user study on
the ability of humans to detect today's Sybil accounts, using a large corpus of
ground-truth Sybil accounts from the Facebook and Renren networks. We analyze
detection accuracy by both "experts" and "turkers" under a variety of
conditions, and find that while turkers vary significantly in their
effectiveness, experts consistently produce near-optimal results. We use these
results to drive the design of a multi-tier crowdsourcing Sybil detection
system. Using our user study data, we show that this system is scalable, and
can be highly effective either as a standalone system or as a complementary
technique to current tools
Web Video in Numbers - An Analysis of Web-Video Metadata
Web video is often used as a source of data in various fields of study. While
specialized subsets of web video, mainly earmarked for dedicated purposes, are
often analyzed in detail, there is little information available about the
properties of web video as a whole. In this paper we present insights gained
from the analysis of the metadata associated with more than 120 million videos
harvested from two popular web video platforms, vimeo and YouTube, in 2016 and
compare their properties with the ones found in commonly used video
collections. This comparison has revealed that existing collections do not (or
no longer) properly reflect the properties of web video "in the wild".Comment: Dataset available from http://download-dbis.dmi.unibas.ch/WWIN
- âŠ