71 research outputs found
The paradigm-shift of social spambots: Evidence, theories, and tools for the arms race
Recent studies in social media spam and automation provide anecdotal
argumentation of the rise of a new generation of spambots, so-called social
spambots. Here, for the first time, we extensively study this novel phenomenon
on Twitter and we provide quantitative evidence that a paradigm-shift exists in
spambot design. First, we measure current Twitter's capabilities of detecting
the new social spambots. Later, we assess the human performance in
discriminating between genuine accounts, social spambots, and traditional
spambots. Then, we benchmark several state-of-the-art techniques proposed by
the academic literature. Results show that neither Twitter, nor humans, nor
cutting-edge applications are currently capable of accurately detecting the new
social spambots. Our results call for new approaches capable of turning the
tide in the fight against this raising phenomenon. We conclude by reviewing the
latest literature on spambots detection and we highlight an emerging common
research trend based on the analysis of collective behaviors. Insights derived
from both our extensive experimental campaign and survey shed light on the most
promising directions of research and lay the foundations for the arms race
against the novel social spambots. Finally, to foster research on this novel
phenomenon, we make publicly available to the scientific community all the
datasets used in this study.Comment: To appear in Proc. 26th WWW, 2017, Companion Volume (Web Science
Track, Perth, Australia, 3-7 April, 2017
DNA-inspired online behavioral modeling and its application to spambot detection
We propose a strikingly novel, simple, and effective approach to model online
user behavior: we extract and analyze digital DNA sequences from user online
actions and we use Twitter as a benchmark to test our proposal. We obtain an
incisive and compact DNA-inspired characterization of user actions. Then, we
apply standard DNA analysis techniques to discriminate between genuine and
spambot accounts on Twitter. An experimental campaign supports our proposal,
showing its effectiveness and viability. To the best of our knowledge, we are
the first ones to identify and adapt DNA-inspired techniques to online user
behavioral modeling. While Twitter spambot detection is a specific use case on
a specific social media, our proposed methodology is platform and technology
agnostic, hence paving the way for diverse behavioral characterization tasks
Social Fingerprinting: detection of spambot groups through DNA-inspired behavioral modeling
Spambot detection in online social networks is a long-lasting challenge
involving the study and design of detection techniques capable of efficiently
identifying ever-evolving spammers. Recently, a new wave of social spambots has
emerged, with advanced human-like characteristics that allow them to go
undetected even by current state-of-the-art algorithms. In this paper, we show
that efficient spambots detection can be achieved via an in-depth analysis of
their collective behaviors exploiting the digital DNA technique for modeling
the behaviors of social network users. Inspired by its biological counterpart,
in the digital DNA representation the behavioral lifetime of a digital account
is encoded in a sequence of characters. Then, we define a similarity measure
for such digital DNA sequences. We build upon digital DNA and the similarity
between groups of users to characterize both genuine accounts and spambots.
Leveraging such characterization, we design the Social Fingerprinting
technique, which is able to discriminate among spambots and genuine accounts in
both a supervised and an unsupervised fashion. We finally evaluate the
effectiveness of Social Fingerprinting and we compare it with three
state-of-the-art detection algorithms. Among the peculiarities of our approach
is the possibility to apply off-the-shelf DNA analysis techniques to study
online users behaviors and to efficiently rely on a limited number of
lightweight account characteristics
Fame for sale: efficient detection of fake Twitter followers
are those Twitter accounts specifically created to
inflate the number of followers of a target account. Fake followers are
dangerous for the social platform and beyond, since they may alter concepts
like popularity and influence in the Twittersphere - hence impacting on
economy, politics, and society. In this paper, we contribute along different
dimensions. First, we review some of the most relevant existing features and
rules (proposed by Academia and Media) for anomalous Twitter accounts
detection. Second, we create a baseline dataset of verified human and fake
follower accounts. Such baseline dataset is publicly available to the
scientific community. Then, we exploit the baseline dataset to train a set of
machine-learning classifiers built over the reviewed rules and features. Our
results show that most of the rules proposed by Media provide unsatisfactory
performance in revealing fake followers, while features proposed in the past by
Academia for spam detection provide good results. Building on the most
promising features, we revise the classifiers both in terms of reduction of
overfitting and cost for gathering the data needed to compute the features. The
final result is a novel classifier, general enough to thwart
overfitting, lightweight thanks to the usage of the less costly features, and
still able to correctly classify more than 95% of the accounts of the original
training set. We ultimately perform an information fusion-based sensitivity
analysis, to assess the global sensitivity of each of the features employed by
the classifier. The findings reported in this paper, other than being supported
by a thorough experimental methodology and interesting on their own, also pave
the way for further investigation on the novel issue of fake Twitter followers
The Mass-Metallicity and the Fundamental Metallicity Relation revisited on a fully Te-based abundance scale for galaxies
The relationships between stellar mass, gas-phase metallicity and star formation rate (i.e. the Mass-Metallicity, MZR, and the Fundamental Metallcity Relation, FMR) in the local Universe are revisited by fully anchoring the metallicity determination for SDSS galaxies on the Te abundance scale de ned exploiting the strong-line metallicity calibrations presented in Curti et al. (2017). Self-consistent metallicity measurements allow a more unbiased assessment of the scaling relations involving M, Z and SFR, which provide powerful constraints for the chemical evolution models. We paramet-rise the MZR with a new functional form which allows us to better characterise the turnover mass. The slope and saturation metallicity are in good agreement with pre-
vious determinations of the MZR based on the Te method, while showing signi cantly lower normalisation compared to those based on photoionisation models. The Z-SFR dependence at xed stellar mass is also investigated, being particularly evident for highly star forming galaxies, where the scatter in metallicity is reduced up to a factor of 30%. A new parametrisation of the FMR is given by explicitly introducing the SFR-dependence of the turnover mass into the MZR. The residual scatter in metal-licity for the global galaxy population around the new FMR is 0:054 dex. The new FMR presented in this work represents a useful local benchmark to compare theor-etical predictions and observational studies (of both local and high-redshift galaxies) whose metallicity measurements are tied to the abundance scale de ned by the Te method, hence allowing to properly assess its evolution with cosmic time.ERC; STF
Regulación de los contratos Joint Venture en la legislación peruana
La presente investigación tiene como problemática la falta de regulación
normativa de los contratos Joint Venture, principalmente porque esta ejecución
contractual puede solucionar diversos problemas empresariales que suceden
entre la competencia y la necesidad de unir fuerzas empresariales para una mejor
obtención de resultados es asà que se determina que la contratación del Joint
Venture dentro de la legislación peruana como una eficaz internacionalizándose
a través de una actividad transfronteriza de las empresas internacionales, en
donde se puede generar como un mecanismo para poder compartir riesgos
extranjeros y locales a través de todo el mundo, pues para ello se requiere tomar
en cuenta aspectos metodológicos basados en un tipo aplicado y en un diseño
no experimental, ante esto la población cuenta con abogados y jueces especiales
en materia civil dentro de la región Lambayeque, llegando a la conclusión que
dentro de la legislación peruana, se logró regular bajo la ley general de
sociedades los contratos de Joint Venture, con la finalidad de que las empresas
cuenten con una mejor estrategia empresarial y flexibilidad económica entre
empresas.TesisCiencias jurÃdica
Fake accounts detection on Twitter
Fake followers are those Twitter accounts created to inflate the number of followers of a target account. Fake followers are dangerous to the social platform and beyond, since they may alter concepts like popularity and influence in the Twittersphere-hence impacting on economy, politics, and Society. In this paper, we provide several contributions. First, we review the most relevant existing criteria (proposed by Academia and Media) for anomalous Twitter accounts detection, and later we assess their capability to detect fake followers. In particular, we contribute with the creation of a gold standard of verified human, as well as with a set of known fake accounts. We test the above cited criteria against these two data sets, showing that the analyzed mechanisms provide unsatisfactory performance in revealing fake followers. Moreover, building upon these results, we also introduce a novel taxonomy to discriminate fake followers from legitimate ones and spammers. The findings reported in this paper, other than being supported by a thorough experimental methodology and being interesting on their own, also pave the way for further investigation
A Fake Follower Story: improving fake accounts detection on Twitter
Fake followers are those Twitter accounts created to inflate the number of followers of a target account. Fake followers are dangerous to the social platform and beyond, since they may alter concepts like popularity and influence in the Twittersphere-hence impacting on economy, politics, and Society. In this paper, we contribute along different dimensions. First, we review some of the most relevant existing features and rules (proposed by Academia and Media) for anomalous Twitter accounts detection. Second, we create a gold standard of verified human and fake accounts. Then, we exploit the gold standard to train a set of machine-learning classifiers built over the reviewed rules and features. Most of the rules provided by Media provide unsatisfactory performance in revealing fake followers, while features provided by Academia for spam detection result in good performance. Building on the most promising features, we optimise the classifiers both in terms of reduction of overfitting and costs for gathering the data needed to compute the features.<br>The final result is a "Class A" classifier, that is general enough to thwart overfitting and that uses the less costly features, while being able to correctly classify more than 95% of the accounts of the training set.<br>The findings reported in this paper, other than being supported by a thorough experimental methodology and being interesting on their own, also pave the way for further investigatio
A Survey on Computational Propaganda Detection
Propaganda campaigns aim at influencing people's mindset with the purpose of
advancing a specific agenda. They exploit the anonymity of the Internet, the
micro-profiling ability of social networks, and the ease of automatically
creating and managing coordinated networks of accounts, to reach millions of
social network users with persuasive messages, specifically targeted to topics
each individual user is sensitive to, and ultimately influencing the outcome on
a targeted issue. In this survey, we review the state of the art on
computational propaganda detection from the perspective of Natural Language
Processing and Network Analysis, arguing about the need for combined efforts
between these communities. We further discuss current challenges and future
research directions.Comment: propaganda detection, disinformation, misinformation, fake news,
media bia
- …