Discovering Typed Communities in Mobile Social Networks

Mobile social networks,which consist of mobile users who communicate with each other using cell phones,are reflections of people’s interactions in social lives.Discovering typed communities(e.g.,family communities or corporate communities) in mobile social networks is a very promising problem.For example,it can help mobile operators to determine the target users for precision marketing.In this paper we propose discovering typed communities in mobile social networks by utilizing the labels of relationships between users.We use the user logs stored by mobile operators,including communication and user movement records,to collectively label all the relationships in a network,by employing an undirected probabilistic graphical model,i.e.,conditional random fields.Then we use two methods to discover typed communities based on the results of relationship labeling:one is simply retaining or cutting relationships according to their labels,and the other is using sophisticated weighted community detection algorithms.The experimental results show that our proposed framework performs well in terms of the accuracy of typed community detection in mobile social networks.     

Hybrid recommendations for mobile commerce based on mobile phone features

Mobile data communications have evolved as the number of third generation (3G) subscribers has increased. The evolution has triggered an increase in the use of mobile devices, such as mobile phones, to conduct mobile commerce and mobile shopping on the mobile web. There are fewer products to browse on the mobile web; hence, one‐to‐one marketing with product recommendations is important. Typical collaborative filtering (CF) recommendation systems make recommendations to potential customers based on the purchase behaviour of customers with similar preferences. However, this method may suffer from the so‐called sparsity problem, which means there may not be sufficient similar users because the user‐item rating matrix is sparse. In mobile shopping environments, the features of users' mobile phones provide different functionalities for using mobile services; thus, the features may be used to identify users with similar purchase behaviour. In this paper, we propose a mobile phone feature (MPF)‐based hybrid method to resolve the sparsity issue of the typical CF method in mobile environments. We use the features of mobile phones to identify users' characteristics and then cluster users into groups with similar interests. The hybrid method combines the MPF‐based method and a preference‐based method that uses association rule mining to extract recommendation rules from user groups and make recommendations. Our experiment results show that the proposed hybrid method performs better than other recommendation methods.     

Personalized Tag Recommendation Using Social Influence

Tag recommendation encourages users to add more tags in bridging the semantic gap between human concept and the features of media object,which provides a feasible solution for content-based multimedia information retrieval.In this paper,we study personalized tag recommendation in a popular online photo sharing site - Flickr.Social relationship information of users is collected to generate an online social network.From the perspective of network topology,we propose node topological potential to characterize user’s social influence.With this metric,we distinguish different social relations between users and find out those who really have influence on the target users.Tag recommendations are based on tagging history and the latent personalized preference learned from those who have most influence in user’s social network.We evaluate our method on large scale real-world data.The experimental results demonstrate that our method can outperform the non-personalized global co-occurrence method and other two state-of-the-art personalized approaches using social networks.We also analyze the further usage of our approach for the cold-start problem of tag recommendation.     

Orchard: Exploring Multivariate Heterogeneous Networks on Mobile Phones

People are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their ability to navigate information spaces using search, hyperlinks, and visualization. But, mobile phones preclude the use of multiple coordinated views that have proven effective in the desktop environment (e.g., for business intelligence or visual analytics). In this work, we propose to model information as multivariate heterogeneous networks to enable greater analytic expression for a range of sensemaking tasks while suggesting a new, list-based paradigm with gestural navigation of structured information spaces on mobile phones. We also present a mobile application, called Orchard, which combines ideas from both faceted search and interactive network exploration in a visual query language to allow users to collect facets of interest during exploratory navigation. Our study showed that users could collect and combine these facets with Orchard, specifying network queries and projections that would only have been possible previously using complex data tools or custom data science.     

Joint user knowledge and matrix factorization for recommender systems

Currently, most of the existing recommendation methods treat social network users equally, which assume that the effect of recommendation on a user is decided by the user’s own preferences and social influence. However, a user’s own knowledge in a field has not been considered. In other words, to what extent does a user accept recommendations in social networks need to consider the user’s own knowledge or expertise in the field. In this paper, we propose a novel matrix factorization recommendation algorithm based on integrating social network information such as trust relationships, rating information of users and users’ own knowledge. Specifically, since we cannot directly measure a user’s knowledge in the field, we first use a user’s status in a social network to indicate a user’s knowledge in a field, and users’ status is inferred from the distributions of users’ ratings and followers across fields or the structure of domain-specific social network. Then, we model the final rating of decision-making as a linear combination of the user’s own preferences, social influence and user’s own knowledge. Experimental results on real world data sets show that our proposed approach generally outperforms the state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms that do not consider the knowledge level difference between the users.     

Personalized blog content recommender system for mobile phone users

Compared to newspaper columnists and broadcast media commentators, bloggers do not have organizations actively promoting their content to users; instead, they rely on word-of-mouth or casual visits by web surfers. We believe the WAP Push service feature of mobile phones can help bridge the gap between internet and mobile services, and expand the number of potential blog readers. Since mobile phone screen size is very limited, content providers must be familiar with individual user preferences in order to recommend content that matches narrowly defined personal interests. To help identify popular blog topics, we have created (a) an information retrieval process that clusters blogs into groups based on keyword analyses, and (b) a mobile content recommender system (M-CRS) for calculating user preferences for new blog documents. Here we describe results from a case study involving 20,000 mobile phone users in which we examined the effects of personalized content recommendations. Browsing habits and user histories were recorded and analyzed to determine individual preferences for making content recommendations via the WAP Push feature. The evaluation results of our recommender system indicate significant increases in both blog-related push service click rates and user time spent reading personalized web pages. The process used in this study supports accurate recommendations of personalized mobile content according to user interests. This approach can be applied to other embedded systems with device limitations, since document subject lines are elaborated and more attractive to intended users.     

Ubiquitous conference management system for mobile recommendation services based on mobilizing social networks: A case study of u-conference

In this paper, we propose a social network-based mechanism to be aware of user contexts and to provide contextually relevant mobile services to users. A social network among users is regarded as the channel for exchanging and propagating their contexts. To efficiently discover the contexts of a certain users the contexts of his neighbors can be fused to provide mobile recommendation service to mobile subscribers. However, since the social network of a user has been fragmented into more than one, it is difficult to put the number of contexts from the fragmented social networks together (Jung, 2009b). Thereby, we mobilize all possible on- and off-line social networks to build an ego-centric social network. We have implemented the proposed system, which is called u-conference system, by collecting the social network dataset from online (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, CyWorld, and co-authoring patterns in major Korean journals) and offline (e.g., co-participation patterns in a number of Korean domestic conferences). Once we have implemented the system, we have provided mobile services to the conference participants by sending text messages about time schedule of relevant presentations.     

Predicting user demographics from music listening information

Online activities such as social networking, online shopping, and consuming multi-media create digital traces, which are often analyzed and used to improve user experience and increase revenue, e. g., through better-fitting recommendations and more targeted marketing. Analyses of digital traces typically aim to find user traits such as age, gender, and nationality to derive common preferences. We investigate to which extent the music listening habits of users of the social music platform Last.fm can be used to predict their age, gender, and nationality. We propose a feature modeling approach building on Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) for artist listening information and artist tags combined with additionally extracted features. We show that we can substantially outperform a baseline majority voting approach and can compete with existing approaches. Further, regarding prediction accuracy vs. available listening data we show that even one single listening event per user is enough to outperform the baseline in all prediction tasks. We also compare the performance of our algorithm for different user groups and discuss possible prediction errors and how to mitigate them. We conclude that personal information can be derived from music listening information, which indeed can help better tailoring recommendations, as we illustrate with the use case of a music recommender system that can directly utilize the user attributes predicted by our algorithm to increase the quality of it’s recommendations.

     

kNN processing with co-space distance in SoLoMo systems

With the increasing popularity of smart phones, SoLoMo (Social-Location-Mobile) systems are expected to be fast-growing and become a popular mobile social networking platform. A main challenge in such systems is on the creation of stable links between users. For each online user, the current SoLoMo system continuously returns his/her kNN (k Nearest Neighbor) users based on their geo-locations. Such a recommendation approach is simple, but fails to create sustainable friendships. Instead, it would be more effective to tap onto the existing social relationships in conventional social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, to provide a “better” friend recommendations.To measure the similarity between users, we propose a new metric, co-space distance, by considering both the user distances in the real world (physical distance) and the virtual world (social distance). The co-space distance measures the similarity of two users in the SoLoMo system. We compute the social distances between users based on their public information in the conventional social networks, which can be achieved by a few MapReduce jobs. To facilitate efficient computation of the social distance, we build a distributed index on top of the key-value store, and maintain the users’ geo-locations using an R-tree. For each query on finding potential friends around a location, we return kNN neighbors to each user based on their co-space distances. We propose a progressive top-k processing strategy and an adaptive-caching strategy to facilitate efficient query processing. Experiments with Gowalla dataset¹ show the effectiveness and efficiency of our recommendation approach.     

手机病毒的危害与防治研究

随着信息技术迅猛发展,互联网已越来越深入到了当今社会的各行各业以及人们的生活当中,尤其是当3G网络以及智能手机的投入使用,正式宣告着全民手机上网时代的来临,人们可以随时随地通过手机网络进行各种活动,因此受到广大用户的欢迎。然而网络在带来方便的同时,也不可避免地带来了种种危害,而其中最为危险的便是那些潜伏在网络中的黑客,通过编译病毒和木马攻击广大网络用户,盗取用户的信息账号,造成了巨大的损失。而因为现在的手机在软硬件条件上还不够成熟,对于新出现的那些专门针对手机的病毒木马缺乏有效的防治手段,因此也已经日益成为了黑客病毒攻击的重点目标。如何保护手机的信息安全,防范来自网络黑客的攻击,便是讨论的重点。     

基于用户信任和兴趣的概率矩阵分解推荐方法

传统协同过滤推荐算法存在数据稀疏性、冷启动、新用户等问题.随着社交网络和电子商务的迅猛发展,利用用户间的信任关系和用户兴趣提供个性化推荐成为研究的热点.本文提出一种结合用户信任和兴趣的概率矩阵分解（STUIPMF）推荐方法.该方法首先从用户评分角度挖掘用户间的隐性信任关系和潜在兴趣标签,然后利用概率矩阵分解模型对用户评分信息、用户信任关系、用户兴趣标签信息进行矩阵分解,进一步挖掘用户潜在特征,缓解数据稀疏性.在Epinions数据集上进行实验验证,结果表明,该方法能够在一定程度上提高推荐精度,缓解冷启动和新用户问题,同时具有较好的可扩展性.     

PerContRep: a practical reputation system for pervasive content services

Social network has extended its popularity from the Internet to mobile domain. Personal mobile devices can be self-organized and communicate with each other for instant social activities at any time and in any places to achieve pervasive social networking (PSN). In such a network, various content information flows. To which extent should mobile users trust it, whilst user privacy can also be preserved? Existing work has not yet seriously considered trust and reputation management, although trust plays an important role in PSN. In this paper, we propose PerContRep, a practical reputation system for pervasive content services that can assist trustworthy content selection and consumption in a pervasive manner. We develop a hybrid trust and reputation management model to evaluate node recommendation trust and content reputation in the context of frequent change of node pseudonyms. Simulations show the advantages of PerContRep in assisting user decisions and its effectiveness with regard to unfair rating attack, collaborative unfair rating attack, on-off attack and conflict behavior attack. A prototype system achieves positive user feedback on its usability and social acceptance.     

Wireless advertising's challenges and opportunities

Rapidly developing wireless net-working technology and the growing mobile-device user base have fueled interest in activities that deliver advertisements to mobile devices over a wireless network. Studies by wireless media research companies indicate that delivering permission-based alerts to wireless phones captures consumers' attention, drives response actions, and builds brand awareness. Wireless devices are accessible, personal, and location aware. These characteristics allow for highly targeted, flexible, and dynamic wireless advertisements. Yet the target audience is vast, and users must be able to search for information, issue inquiries, and make purchases at any mobile location.     

基于元路径嵌入的移动应用需求偏好分析方法

随着互联网和移动应用平台的快速发展,围绕移动应用所产生的海量用户数据已经成为精确分析用户需求偏好的重要数据源.尽管已有不少学者从这些数据中分析和挖掘用户需求,但现有的方法通常只研究了数据的少数维度的特征,未能有效地挖掘多维移动应用信息以及他们之间的关联.提出一种基于元路径嵌入的移动应用需求偏好分析方法,能够为用户进行个...     

On the analysis of statistics of mobile visitors

This paper discusses location-based mobile services. The problem of counting mobile users (mobile phones) in a selected area is considered. The information available from the analysis of wire-less protocols (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth) is used for the calculation. The aim of the study is to construct an analog of systems of web statistics operating with real mobile subscribers (instead of data on web page visits as in web statistics). As a result, we obtain information about traffic, identification and analysis of trends in user traffic, search for the core of regular visitors, and detection of its dynamics. The paper presents algorithms for calculating network proximity and examples of use.     

“With a little help from new friends”: Boosting information cascades in social networks based on link injection

We investigate information cascades in the context of viral marketing applications. Recent research has identified that communities in social networks may hinder cascades. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel method for injecting social links in a social network, aiming at boosting the spread of information cascades. Unlike the proposed approach, existing link prediction methods do not consider the optimization of information cascades as an explicit objective. In our proposed method, the injected links are being predicted in a collaborative-filtering fashion, based on factorizing the adjacency matrix that represents the structure of the social network. Our method controls the number of injected links to avoid an “aggressive” injection scheme that may compromise the experience of users. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method by examining real data sets from social networks and several additional factors. Our results indicate that the proposed scheme can boost information cascades in social networks and can operate as a “people recommendations” strategy complementary to currently applied methods that are based on the number of common neighbors (e.g., “friend of friend”) or on the similarity of user profiles.     

UX Curve: A method for evaluating long-term user experience

The goal of user experience design in industry is to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the utility, ease of use, and pleasure provided in the interaction with a product. So far, user experience studies have mostly focused on short-term evaluations and consequently on aspects relating to the initial adoption of new product designs. Nevertheless, the relationship between the user and the product evolves over long periods of time and the relevance of prolonged use for market success has been recently highlighted. In this paper, we argue for the cost-effective elicitation of longitudinal user experience data. We propose a method called the “UX Curve” which aims at assisting users in retrospectively reporting how and why their experience with a product has changed over time. The usefulness of the UX Curve method was assessed in a qualitative study with 20 mobile phone users. In particular, we investigated how users’ specific memories of their experiences with their mobile phones guide their behavior and their willingness to recommend the product to others. The results suggest that the UX Curve method enables users and researchers to determine the quality of long-term user experience and the influences that improve user experience over time or cause it to deteriorate. The method provided rich qualitative data and we found that an improving trend of perceived attractiveness of mobile phones was related to user satisfaction and willingness to recommend their phone to friends. This highlights that sustaining perceived attractiveness can be a differentiating factor in the user acceptance of personal interactive products such as mobile phones. The study suggests that the proposed method can be used as a straightforward tool for understanding the reasons why user experience improves or worsens in long-term product use and how these reasons relate to customer loyalty.     

Spatial cloaking for anonymous location-based services in mobile peer-to-peer environments

This paper tackles a privacy breach in current location-based services (LBS) where mobile users have to report their exact location information to an LBS provider in order to obtain their desired services. For example, a user who wants to issue a query asking about her nearest gas station has to report her exact location to an LBS provider. However, many recent research efforts have indicated that revealing private location information to potentially untrusted LBS providers may lead to major privacy breaches. To preserve user location privacy, spatial cloaking is the most commonly used privacy-enhancing technique in LBS. The basic idea of the spatial cloaking technique is to blur a user’s exact location into a cloaked area that satisfies the user specified privacy requirements. Unfortunately, existing spatial cloaking algorithms designed for LBS rely on fixed communication infrastructure, e.g., base stations, and centralized/distributed servers. Thus, these algorithms cannot be applied to a mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) environment where mobile users can only communicate with other peers through P2P multi-hop routing without any support of fixed communication infrastructure or servers. In this paper, we propose a spatial cloaking algorithm for mobile P2P environments. As mobile P2P environments have many unique limitations, e.g., user mobility, limited transmission range, multi-hop communication, scarce communication resources, and network partitions, we propose three key features to enhance our algorithm: (1) An information sharing scheme enables mobile users to share their gathered peer location information to reduce communication overhead; (2) A historical location scheme allows mobile users to utilize stale peer location information to overcome the network partition problem; and (3) A cloaked area adjustment scheme guarantees that our spatial cloaking algorithm is free from a “center-of-cloaked-area” privacy attack. Experimental results show that our P2P spatial cloaking algorithm is scalable while guaranteeing the user’s location privacy protection.     

基于最短时间距离的校园无线网络用户关联性度量

在校园网络中,存在着大量的信息系统,记录着用户的日常行为信息。通过对大量用户的日常轨迹信息分析,可以发现用户之间的行为关联性,度量用户之间的社会关系强度。基于上海某校的校园网络数据特点,提出了一种改进的基于用户时间序列模型,用最短时间距离进行社会关系度量的方法。该方法首先依据用户的行为数据生成用户行为时间序列,并在此基础上进行行为关联性的度量,以反映用户在真实世界中的社会关系强度,并利用地点访问热度修正社会关系强度的分析结果。实验中使用该方法对上海某校的校园网数据进行分析,度量用户关联性强度,验证了该方法的有效性。