Benchmarking the Privacy-Preserving People Search

People search is an important topic in information retrieval. Many previous studies on this topic employed social networks to boost search performance by incorporating either local network features (e.g. the common connections between the querying user and candidates in social networks), or global network features (e.g. the PageRank), or both. However, the available social network information can be restricted because of the privacy settings of involved users, which in turn would affect the performance of people search. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on the privacy issues in people search. We propose simulating different privacy settings with a public social network due to the unavailability of privacy-concerned networks. Our study examines the influences of privacy concerns on the local and global network features, and their impacts on the performance of people search. Our results show that: 1) the privacy concerns of different people in the networks have different influences. People with higher association (i.e. higher degree in a network) have much greater impacts on the performance of people search; 2) local network features are more sensitive to the privacy concerns, especially when such concerns come from high association peoples in the network who are also related to the querying user. As the first study on this topic, we hope to generate further discussions on these issues.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Chiral phase transition and meson spectrum in improved soft-wall AdS/QCD

We investigate in detail the chiral thermal transition of QCD in an improved soft-wall AdS/QCD model with a simply modified 5D conformal mass of the bulk scalar field. We also present a calculation in this model for the light meson spectra and other low-energy characteristic quantities including the pion form factor, the pi-rho coupling constant and the decay constants of pi, rho, a_1, which are shown to result in a good agreement with experimental data except for the pion decay constant. The thermal behavior of chiral condensate is studied. It is found that such a simply improved soft-wall model incorporates the crossover behavior of chiral thermal transition indicated by lattice simulations. The expected chiral transition temperature can be obtained

Infrared-Improved Soft-wall AdS/QCD Model for Mesons

We construct and investigate an infrared-improved soft-wall AdS/QCD model for mesons. Both linear confinement and chiral symmetry breaking of low energy QCD are well characterized in such an infrared-improved soft-wall AdS/QCD model. The model enables us to obtain a more consistent numerical prediction for the mass spectra of resonance scalar, pseudoscalar, vector and axial-vector mesons. In particular, the predicted mass for the lightest ground state scalar meson shows a good agreement with the experimental data. The model also provides a remarkable check for the Gell-Mann-Oakes-Renner relation and a sensible result for the space-like pion form factor.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 7 tables, published versio

IR-improved Soft-wall AdS/QCD Model for Baryons

We construct an infrared-improved soft-wall AdS/QCD model for baryons by considering the infrared-modified 5D conformal mass and Yukawa coupling of the bulk baryon field. The model is also built by taking into account the parity-doublet pattern for the excited baryons. When taking the bulk vacuum structure of the meson field to be the one obtained consistently in the infrared-improved soft-wall AdS/QCD model for mesons, we arrive at a consistent prediction for the baryon mass spectrum in even and odd parity. The prediction shows a remarkable agreement with the experimental data. We also perform a calculation for the $\rho(a_1)$ meson-nucleon coupling constant and obtain a consistent result in comparison with the experimental data and many other models.Comment: 12 pages, 4 tables, 1 figure, to be published in PL