User-centric universal multimedia access in home networks

Much research is currently being conducted towards Universal Multimedia Access, aiming at removing barriers that arise when multimedia content is to be consumed with more and more heterogeneous devices and over diverse networks. We argue that users should be put at the center of the research work to enable user-centric multimedia access. In this paper we present the requirements for a user-centric multimedia access system in a networked home environment. These requirements are easy access to available content repositories, context awareness, content adaptation and session migration. After showing the limits of state-of-the-art technologies, we present the architecture of a system which allows unified access to the home network content, automatically delivered to rendering devices close to the user, adapted according to the rendering device constraints, and which is also capable of session mobility.     

Arnetminer: expertise oriented search using social networks

Expertise Oriented Search (EOS) aims at providing comprehensive expertise analysis on data from distributed sources. It is useful in many application domains, for example, finding experts on a given topic, detecting the confliction of interest between researchers, and assigning reviewers to proposals. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of our expertise oriented search system, Arnetminer (). Arnetminer has gathered and integrated information about a half-million computer science researchers from the Web, including their profiles and publications. Moreover, Arnetminer constructs a social network among these researchers through their co-authorship, and utilizes this network information as well as the individual profiles to facilitate expertise oriented search tasks. In particular, the co-authorship information is used both in ranking the expertise of individual researchers for a given topic and in searching for associations between researchers. We have conducted initial experiments on Arnetminer. Our results demonstrate that the proposed relevancy propagation expert finding method outperforms the method that only uses person local information, and the proposed two-stage association search on a large-scale social network is order of magnitude faster than the baseline method.     

Evaluating choice in universal access: an example from rehabilitation robotics

This paper describes a technique using dimensional analysis that so far has been rarely, if ever, used in studies of universal access. However, this procedure can produce a robust decision support process for inclusive designs. In this paper, it is applied to a case study of a wheelchair robot computer interface with choices in data input methods, addressing disparate requirements of different groups of intended users. The main underlying issue is to combine technical measurements, speed of operation and cost with subjective opinion. It turns out that Braglia’s method has greater robustness in determining rank compared to standard techniques. In this, case a simple switch was rated better than a mouse or voice operation for control.     

Large-scale access scheduling in wireless mesh networks using social centrality

Wireless mesh networking is an economic and convenient way to provide last mile Internet access through ad hoc peer-to-peer communication links. However, without systematic network configuration and channel resource management, these networks suffer from scalability, performance degradation and service disruption issues due to overwhelming co-channel interference, unscrupulous channel utilization and inherent network mobility. The IEEE 802.11 DCF and EDCA mechanisms based on CSMA/CA are the most widely used random channel access mechanisms, but unfortunately these cannot effectively eliminate hidden terminal and exposed terminal problems in multi-hop scenarios. Social network analysis techniques proposed for economic and social studies have recently been shown to be a successful approach for characterizing information propagation in multi-hop wireless networks. We propose a set of efficient resource allocation algorithms and channel access scheduling protocols based on Latin squares and social centrality metrics for wireless mesh networks (WMNs) with multi-radio multi-channel (MRMC) communication capabilities, called LaSo$LaSo$, which can coexist with IEEE 802.11 DCF and be effectively applied in large scale WMNs. Based on interference information provided by the interference graph, LaSo$LaSo$ uses nodal degree centrality to form cliques for intra-cluster communication, and betweenness centrality to choose bridge nodes to form cliques for inter-cluster communication in WMNs, and then applies Latin squares to map the clique-based clustering structure to radios and channels for wireless communication purposes. Afterwards, LaSo$LaSo$ again applies Latin squares to schedule the channel access amongst nodes within each cluster in a collision-free manner. We evaluate LaSo$LaSo$ using simulations, and results show that LaSo$LaSo$ achieves much better performance than existing IEEE 802.11 standards and other multi-channel access control protocols.     

Novel authentication procedures for preventing unauthorized access in social networks

Online Social Network (OSN) is the most widely used platform to communicate with one another. It is fast and cheap when compared to other modes of communication. However, Online Social Network profiles are being hacked often by employing various types of malicious attacks. Most of the times the attackers are successful in accessing the OSN account which illustrates that the present authentication mechanisms are not efficient enough. Once an online social network account is being hacked, it can be misused widely and the hacker makes the authorized user unable to login to the account by changing the login credentials. Security in OSN must be provided and it must prevent the attacks aimed by the attackers. However, to prevent unauthorized access in OSN a novel authentication procedure is needed and the novel authentication mechanism must abide the social network platform’s characteristics. This paper considers the attackers who aim to access the OSN account in an unauthorized manner and presents two novel authentication mechanisms to prevent the OSN platform. The proposed procedures make use of users’ chatting module statistics and relationship circle statistics to authenticate the users in Online Social Networks. This can be done by Multi kernel Fuzzy C-Means (MKFCM) Algorithm and Group Search Optimizer (GSO). These novel authentication procedures abide the OSN characteristics, as it makes use of Chatting and Relationship module.     

Stories,journeys and smart maps: an approach to universal access

Universal Access in the Information Society - This paper proposes a new approach to universal access based on the premise that humans have the universal capacity to engage emotionally with a story,...     

基于机会网络中社交关系的转发机制

由于现有的机会网络转发机制不能完全适应社会网络中基于社交关系的判断与分析,为此通过建立社交关系的分类,构建机会网络中的社会关系树结构模型,提出了一种新的转发机制。该机制设置了节点权重值,由节点所处的层次和社会关系的可利用性及可靠性决定。通过路径权重值,选择最有价值的路径进行消息的传递。通过仿真实验,所提出的转发机制有效地降低了网络中的消息副本数和降低了路由开销。     

一种新型在线社交网络协作访问控制机制

在线社交网络可以为数字用户提供社会互动和信息共享,但是它存在隐私安全问题。针对用户隐私保护问题,提出了一种保护机制,允许用户在协作条件下控制访问共享资源。这种新的在线社交网路协作访问控制机制,通过定义数据拥有者、利益相关者和信任度三个因素来描述其控制机制,对于新方案重点协作策略规则和信任度的计算,给出了具体的解释。研究结果表明,用户共享内容的安全问题很大程度上得到保护,且不论单用户访问还是多用户访问,隐私安全大大得到加强。     

Efficiency-driven selection of bandwidth request mechanism in broadband wireless access networks

To avoid collisions in WiMAX networks, the connections in Subscriber Stations (SSs) use a request–grant process to acquire transmission resources from the Base Station (BS). In accordance with the IEEE 802.16 standard, the request–grant process is accomplished using either a unicast polling method or a contention request method. In WiMAX systems, the number of bandwidth-request (BR) slots per frame is limited. Thus, to enhance the network performance, the BR slots must be used in the most efficient manner possible. In practical WiMAX systems, the offered network load varies over time, and thus the strict use of either the unicast polling method or the contention request method results in a poor utilization efficiency of the BR slots. Accordingly, the present study proposes a scheme designated as Efficiency-Driven Selection of Bandwidth Request (EDSBR), in which the request–grant mechanism is adjusted dynamically on a frame-by-frame basis in accordance with the network conditions. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by simulations. The results show that EDSBR achieves a more efficient utilization of the BR slots than the unicast polling scheme or the contention request scheme, and therefore yields an improved network performance.     

A path-traceable query routing mechanism for search in unstructured peer-to-peer networks

Unstructured Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have become a very popular architecture for content distribution in large-scale and dynamic environments. Searching for content in unstructured P2P networks is a challenging task because the distribution of objects has no association with the organization of peers. Proposed methods in recent years either depend too much on objects replication rate or suffer from a sharp decline in performance when objects stored in peers change rapidly, although their performance is better than flooding or random walk algorithms to some extent. In this paper, we propose a novel query routing mechanism for improving query performance in unstructured P2P networks. We design a data structure called traceable gain matrix (TGM) that records every query's gain at each peer along the query hit path, and allows for optimizing query routing decision effectively. Experimental results show that our query routing mechanism achieves relatively high query hit rate with low bandwidth consumption in different types of network topologies under static and dynamic network conditions.     

An efficient mechanism for processing similarity search queries in sensor networks

The similarity search problem has received considerable attention in database research community. In sensor network applications, this problem is even more important due to the imprecision of the sensor hardware, and variation of environmental parameters. Traditional similarity search mechanisms are both improper and inefficient for these highly energy-constrained sensors. A difficulty is that it is hard to predict which sensor has the most similar (or closest) data item such that many or even all sensors need to send their data to the query node for further comparison. In this paper, we propose a similarity search algorithm (SSA), which is a novel framework based on the concept of Hilbert curve over a data-centric storage structure, for efficiently processing similarity search queries in sensor networks. SSA successfully avoids the need of collecting data from all sensors in the network in searching for the most similar data item. The performance study reveals that this mechanism is highly efficient and significantly outperforms previous approaches in processing similarity search queries.     

The universal remote console: a universal access bus for pervasive computing

V2, a technical committee of the International Committee for information technology standards is developing standards for information technology access interfaces. As part of this endeavor, V2 is to issue the Universal Remote Console architecture, a set of draft standards for public review and comment. The five standards specify communications between a Target - a device or service the user wishes to access and a universal remote console-software that is typically hosted on a user's personal device. The standards specify mechanisms for the discovery, selection, configuration, and operation of user interfaces and its options.     

A novel trust-based access control for social networks using fuzzy systems

World Wide Web - Social networks are constantly expanding and attracting more and more users. The users of these networks share plenty of information with their friends, many of which are...     

基于信息混淆的社会网络隐私保护机制

提出了一种基于信息混淆的社会网络隐私保护机制,其原理在于对整个社会网络里的隐私信息进行混淆,而非加密,使得需要保护的隐私信息以环形结构在社会网络里扩散开来。该机制以非集中化的方式工作,由用户之间的相互协作来保护用户的隐私信息。以"人人网"为平台,利用Firefox的扩展开发功能实现了该隐私保护的核心机制,证明了其可行性与可用性。该机制能够保证多方面的利益:要求隐私保护的主体用户、广告商、经过授权的用户及第三方应用。     

Intelligent content-based cybercrime detection in online social networks using cuckoo search metaheuristic approach

The subject of content-based cybercrime has put on substantial coverage in recent past. It is the need of the time for web-based social media providers to have the capability to distinguish oppressive substance both precisely and proficiently to secure their clients. Support vector machine (SVM) is usually acknowledged as an efficient supervised learning model for various classification problems. Nevertheless, the success of an SVM model relies upon the ideal selection of its parameters as well as the structure of the data. Thus, this research work aims to concurrently optimize the parameters and feature selection with a target to build the quality of SVM. This paper proposes a novel hybrid model that is the integration of cuckoo search and SVM, for feature selection and parameter optimization for efficiently solving the problem of content-based cybercrime detection. The proposed model is tested on four different datasets obtained from Twitter, ASKfm and FormSpring to identify bully terms using Scikit-Learn library and LIBSVM of Python. The results of the proposed model demonstrate significant improvement in the performance of classification on all the datasets in comparison to recent existing models. The success rate of the SVM classifier with the excellent recall is 0.971 via tenfold cross-validation, which demonstrates the high efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed model.

     

Identifying the relevance of quality dimensions contributing to universal access of social Web applications for collaborative writing on mobile devices: an empirical study

When used in a mobile ecosystem, social Web applications are commonly criticized due to their poor quality. We believe this is accounted for by the inadequacy of current approaches for their evaluation as well as the lack of suitable quality models. With an objective to address the aforementioned issues, this paper introduces a quality model that captures the particularities of social Web applications when used on mobile devices. Drawing on the comprehensive literature review, a finite set of performance variables (items, attributes, and categories) that contribute to the mobile quality of social Web applications was identified and subsequently employed for the purpose of designing a conceptual model in the form of a mobile quality requirements tree. An empirical study was then carried out to assess the reliability and validity of the conceptual model and pertaining measuring instrument. During the study, participants accomplished predefined scenarios of interaction with a representative sample of social Web applications for collaborative writing and evaluated their mobile quality by completing the post-use questionnaire. An analysis of data collected from end users uncovered a relevance of performance variables at different levels of granularity in a mobile quality requirements tree as well as pros and cons of evaluated collaborative editors.