Matching user identities across social networks with limited profile data

Privacy preservation is a primary concern in social networkswhich employ a variety of privacy preservations mechanisms to preserve and protect sensitive user information including age, location, education, interests, and others. The task of matching user identities across different social networks is considered a challenging task. In this work, we propose an algorithm to reveal user identities as a set of linked accounts from different social networks using limited user profile data, i.e., user-name and friendship. Thus, we propose a framework, ExpandUIL, that includes three standalone algorithms based on (i) the percolation graph matching in ExpandFullName algorithm, (ii) a supervised machine learning algorithm that works with the graph embedding, and (iii) a combination of the two, ExpandUserLinkage algorithm. The proposed framework as a set of algorithms is significant as, (i) it is based on the network topology and requires only name feature of the nodes, (ii) it requires a considerably low initial seed, as low as one initial seed suffices, (iii) it is iterative and scalable with applicability to online incoming stream graphs, and (iv) it has an experimental proof of stability over a real ground-truth dataset. Experiments on real datasets, Instagram and VK social networks, show upto 75% recall for linked accounts with 96% accuracy using only one given seed pair.     

社会网络的隐私保护研究综述*

某些网站将匿名处理后的社会网络数据公开发布,或者提供给科研机构、大学或者其他组织和个人使用,而这些数据往往侵犯了用户的隐私,但有关社会网络中个人信息安全和隐私保护的研究却处于起步阶段。综述了当前在线社会网络的研究成果,主要就社会网络及其隐私漏洞、信息泄露、再识别攻击、聚集攻击、推理攻击等进行了分析,并对今后的发展提出了预测,为社会网络的科研指出了可行的研究方向。     

On analyzing user preference dynamics with temporal social networks

The preferences adopted by individuals are constantly modified as these are driven by new experiences, natural life evolution and, mainly, influence from friends. Studying these temporal dynamics of user preferences has become increasingly important for personalization tasks in information retrieval and recommendation systems domains. However, existing models are too constrained for capturing the complexity of the underlying phenomenon. Online social networks contain rich information about social interactions and relations. Thus, these become an essential source of knowledge for the understanding of user preferences evolution. In this work, we investigate the interplay between user preferences and social networks over time. First, we propose a temporal preference model able to detect preference change events of a given user. Following this, we use temporal networks concepts to analyze the evolution of social relationships and propose strategies to detect changes in the network structure based on node centrality. Finally, we look for a correlation between preference change events and node centrality change events over Twitter and Jam social music datasets. Our findings show that there is a strong correlation between both change events, specially when modeling social interactions by means of a temporal network.     

基于用户兴趣的跨网络用户身份识别算法

针对现有算法对用户兴趣在跨网络用户身份识别中作用的忽视以及时间复杂度高的问题,提出了基于用户兴趣的跨社交网络用户身份识别算法（UI-UI）。首先利用分块思想对用户节点进行初筛选,以提升算法效率、降低时间复杂度;其次,根据用户产生内容（UGC）和用户社交关系对用户兴趣进行建模,并计算兴趣相似度作为身份识别的依据;最后利用半监督学习的方法进行跨网络用户身份识别。通过在真实社交网络中进行实验,结果表明UI-UI算法能有效识别跨网络用户,且准确率和召回率稳定,运行时间显著减少。     

Recognizing composite daily activities from crowd-labelled social media data

Human activity recognition is a core component of context-aware, ubiquitous computing systems. Traditionally, this task is accomplished by analysing signals of wearable motion sensors. While successful for low-level activities (e.g. walking or standing), high-level activities (e.g. watching movies or attending lectures) are difficult to distinguish from motion data alone. Furthermore, instrumentation of complex body sensor network at population scale is impractical. In this work, we take an alternative approach of leveraging rich, dynamic, and crowd-generated self-report data from social media platforms as the basis for in-situ activity recognition. By treating the user as the “sensor”, we make use of implicit signals emitted from natural use of mobile smartphones, in the form of textual content, semantic location, and time. Tackling both the task of recognizing a main activity (multi-class classification) and recognizing all applicable activity categories (multi-label tagging) from one instance, we are able to obtain mean accuracies of more than 75%. We conduct a thorough analysis and interpret of our model to illustrate a promising first step towards comprehensive, high-level activity recognition using instrumentation-free, crowdsourced, social media data.     

A heuristic approach to discovering user correlations from organized social stream data

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Recently, with the widespread popularity of SNS (Social Network Service), such as Twitter, Facebook, people are increasingly accustomed to sharing feeling,...     

社交网络用户影响力分析ABP算法研究与应用

社交网络作为一种交往方式,已经深入人心。其用户数据在这个大数据时代蕴藏着大量的价值。随着Twitter API的开放,社交网络Twitter俨然成为一个深受欢迎的研究对象,而用户影响力更是其中的研究热点。PageRank算法计算用户影响力已经由来已久,但是它太依赖于用户之间的关注关系,排名不具备时效性。引入用户活跃度的改进PageRank算法,具备一定的时效性,但是不具有足够的说服力和准确性。研究了一种新的基于时间分布用户活跃度的ABP算法,并为不同时段的活跃度加以相应的时效权重因子。最后,以Twitter为研究对象,结合社交关系网,通过实例分析说明ABP算法更具时效性和说服力,可以比较准确地提高活跃用户的排名,降低非活跃用户排名。     

Community detection in social networks using user frequent pattern mining

Recently, social networking sites are offering a rich resource of heterogeneous data. The analysis of such data can lead to the discovery of unknown information and relations in these networks. The detection of communities including ‘similar’ nodes is a challenging topic in the analysis of social network data, and it has been widely studied in the social networking community in the context of underlying graph structure. Online social networks, in addition to having graph structures, include effective user information within networks. Using this information leads to enhance quality of community discovery. In this study, a method of community discovery is provided. Besides communication among nodes to improve the quality of the discovered communities, content information is used as well. This is a new approach based on frequent patterns and the actions of users on networks, particularly social networking sites where users carry out their preferred activities. The main contributions of proposed method are twofold: First, based on the interests and activities of users on networks, some small communities of similar users are discovered, and then by using social relations, the discovered communities are extended. The F-measure is used to evaluate the results of two real-world datasets (Blogcatalog and Flickr), demonstrating that the proposed method principals to improve the community detection quality.     

Inferring user interests in microblogging social networks: a survey

With the growing popularity of microblogging services such as Twitter in recent years, an increasing number of users are using these services in their daily lives. The huge volume of information generated by users raises new opportunities in various applications and areas. Inferring user interests plays a significant role in providing personalized recommendations on microblogging services, and also on third-party applications providing social logins via these services, especially in cold-start situations. In this survey, we review user modeling strategies with respect to inferring user interests from previous studies. To this end, we focus on four dimensions of inferring user interest profiles: (1) data collection, (2) representation of user interest profiles, (3) construction and enhancement of user interest profiles, and (4) the evaluation of the constructed profiles. Through this survey, we aim to provide an overview of state-of-the-art user modeling strategies for inferring user interest profiles on microblogging social networks with respect to the four dimensions. For each dimension, we review and summarize previous studies based on specified criteria. Finally, we discuss some challenges and opportunities for future work in this research domain.     

Geotag propagation in social networks based on user trust model

In the past few years sharing photos within social networks has become very popular. In order to make these huge collections easier to explore, images are usually tagged with representative keywords such as persons, events, objects, and locations. In order to speed up the time consuming tag annotation process, tags can be propagated based on the similarity between image content and context. In this paper, we present a system for efficient geotag propagation based on a combination of object duplicate detection and user trust modeling. The geotags are propagated by training a graph based object model for each of the landmarks on a small tagged image set and finding its duplicates within a large untagged image set. Based on the established correspondences between these two image sets and the reliability of the user, tags are propagated from the tagged to the untagged images. The user trust modeling reduces the risk of propagating wrong tags caused by spamming or faulty annotation. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through a set of experiments on an image database containing various landmarks.     

基于用户关系的跨社交网络用户身份关联方法

为识别出不同社交网络平台中属于同一自然人的账号,提出了一种基于用户关系的跨社交网络用户身份关联方法。首先,设计了基于网络表示学习的用户关系提取模块,将大规模用户关系转换至低维向量空间进行表示;然后,针对异构信息网络改进了传统网络表示学习算法,提出了CSN_LINE算法,实现融合跨社交网络先验关联关系的网络表示;最后,构建了基于多层感知机的用户身份关联模型。实验结果表示,提出的方法与目前先进的方法相比,综合指标F1值和正确率的提高均超过12%,证明了该方法的合理性和有效性。     

Determinants of virtual social networks diffusion: Insights from cross-country data

Utilizing Rogers' diffusion of innovation theory and Hofstede's typology of national culture as the guiding theoretical perspectives, this study examines the determinants of virtual social networks (VSNs) diffusion across countries. Specifically, this study proposes that VSN diffusion in a country is determined by the levels of its information infrastructure and human capital, which in turn are contingent on the national cultural dimension of uncertainty avoidance. By utilizing archival data from 56 countries, we examine (1) the direct effects of information infrastructure and human capital in a country on its VSN diffusion; and (2) the moderating effect of uncertainty avoidance on the relationships of information infrastructure and human capital in a country with its VSN diffusion. Our findings indicate that (1) information infrastructure and human capital in a country were positively associated with its VSN diffusion; and (2) uncertainty avoidance negatively moderated the relationships of information infrastructure and human capital in a country with its VSN diffusion. Our findings contribute to the knowledge base of VSNs by highlighting the contingent role of uncertainty avoidance, and provide indications to practice on managing VSN diffusion in a country by leveraging the effects of its information infrastructure and human capital.     

Learning disentangled user representation with multi-view information fusion on social networks

User representation learning is one prominent and critical task of user analysis on social networks, which derives conceptual user representations to improve the inference of user intentions and behaviors. Previous efforts have shown its substantial value in multifarious real-world applications, including product recommendation, textual content modeling, link prediction, and many more. However, existing studies either underutilize multi-view information, or neglect the stringent entanglement among underlying factors that govern user intentions, thus deriving deteriorated representations. To overcome these shortages, this paper proposes an adversarial fusion framework to fully exploit substantial multi-view information for user representation, consisting of a generator and a discriminator. The generator learns representations with a variational autoencoder, and is forced by the adversarial fusion framework to pay specific attention to substantial informative signs, thus integrating multi-view information. Furthermore, the variational autoencoder used in the generator is novelly designed to capture and disentangle the latent factors behind user intentions. By fully utilizing multi-view information and achieving disentanglement, our model learns robust and interpretable user representations. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model.     

On the engineering of agent-based simulations of social activities with social networks

ContextModels of how people move around cities play a role in making decisions about urban and land-use planning. Previous models have been based on space and time, and have neglected the social aspect of travel. Recent work on agent-based modelling shows promise as a new approach, especially for models with both social and spatial elements.ObjectiveThis paper demonstrates the design and implementation of an agent-based model of social activity generation and scheduling for experimental purposes to explore the effects of social space in addition to physical space. As a side-effect, the paper discusses the need for and requirements on structured design of agent-based models and simulations.MethodModel design was based on the MASQ meta-model and implemented in Python. The model was then tested against several hypotheses with several initial networks.ResultsThe model allowed us to investigate the effects of social networks. We found that the model was most sensitive to the pair attributes of the network, rather than the global or personal attributes.ConclusionAs demonstrated, a structured approach to model development is important in order to be able to understand and apply the results, and for the model to be extensible in the future. Agent-based modelling approaches allow for inclusion of social elements. For models incorporating social networks, testing the sensitivity to the initial network is important to ensure the model performs as expected.     

Neuro-semantic prediction of user decisions to contribute content to online social networks

Neural Computing and Applications - Understanding at microscopic level the generation of contents in an online social network (OSN) is highly desirable for an improved management of the OSN and the...     

Fusion of smartphone sensor data for classification of daily user activities

Multimedia Tools and Applications - New mobile applications need to estimate user activities by using sensor data provided by smart wearable devices and deliver context-aware solutions to users...     

A comparative study of user intention to recommend content on mobile social networks

Multimedia Tools and Applications - This study aims to explore user intention to recommend multimedia content on mobile social networks. To better understand user behavioral differences in content...     

Manifestations of user personality in website choice and behaviour on online social networks

Individual differences in personality affect users’ online activities as much as they do in the offline world. This work, based on a sample of over a third of a million users, examines how users’ behaviour in the online environment, captured by their website choices and Facebook profile features, relates to their personality, as measured by the standard Five Factor Model personality questionnaire. Results show that there are psychologically meaningful links between users’ personalities, their website preferences and Facebook profile features. We show how website audiences differ in terms of their personality, present the relationships between personality and Facebook profile features, and show how an individual’s personality can be predicted from Facebook profile features. We conclude that predicting a user’s personality profile can be applied to personalize content, optimize search results, and improve online advertising.     

S-CLONE: Socially-aware data replication for social networks

Online social networking has become one of the most important forms of today’s communication. While an online social network can be attractive for many socially interesting features, its competitive edge will diminish if it is not able to keep pace with increasing user activities. Deploying more servers is an intuitive way to make the system scale, but for the best performance one needs to determine where best to put the data, whether replication is needed, and, if so, how. This paper is focused on replication; specifically, we propose S-CLONE, a socially-aware data replication scheme which can significantly improve a social network’s efficiency by taking into account social relationships of its data. S-CLONE’s performance is substantiated in our evaluation study.