Devising a user collaboration scheme to automatically generate videos

Nowadays, interacting video contents with the mobile device is a prevalent activity. Generating and sharing the created digitalized stories through a video sharing social networking service is popular among people. Nonetheless, there is no distinctive approach for creating contents with the mobile devices; rather, it follows the traditional media production method. Besides, generating contents does not embrace the idea of utilizing mobile devices’ computing and communication abilities to generate a video content. In this paper, we propose EMVideo. EMVideo is a novel collaboration scheme for mobile devices to automatically edit video frames into a video. We believe that the proposed scheme can be utilized as an innovative application for digital storytelling.     

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.     

FlowTrust: trust inference with network flows

Web-based social networking is increasingly gaining popularity due to the rapid development of computer networking technologies. However, social networking applications still cannot obtain a wider acceptance by many users due to some unresolved issues, such as trust, security, and privacy. In social networks, trust is mainly studied whether a remote user behaves as expected by an interested user via other users, who are respectively named trustee, trustor, and recommenders. A trust graph consists of a trustor, a trustee, some recommenders, and the trust relationships between them. In this paper, we propose a novel FlowTrust approach to model a trust graph with network flows, and evaluate the maximum amount of trust that can flow through a trust graph using network flow theory. FlowTrust supports multi-dimensional trust. We use trust value and confidence level as two trust factors.We deduce four trust metrics from these two trust factors, which are maximum flow of trust value, maximum flow of confidence level, minimum cost of uncertainty with maximum flow of trust, and minimum cost of mistrust with maximum flow of confidence. We also propose three FlowTrust algorithms to normalize these four trust metrics. We compare our proposed FlowTrust approach with the existing RelTrust and CircuitTrust approaches. We show that all three approaches are comparable in terms of the inferred trust values. Therefore, FlowTrust is the best of the three since it also supports multi-dimensional trust.     

基于位置服务中的连续查询隐私保护研究

近年来,伴随着移动计算技术和无限设备的蓬勃发展,位置服务中的隐私保护研究受到了学术界的广泛关注,提出了很多匿名算法以保护移动用户的隐私信息.但是现有方法均针对snapshot查询,不能适用于连续查询.如果将现有的静态匿名算法直接应用于连续查询,将会产生隐私泄露、匿名服务器工作代价大等问题.针对这些问题,提出了δp-隐私模型和δq-质量模型来均衡隐私保护与服务质量的矛盾,并基于此提出了一种贪心匿名算法.该算法不仅适用于snapshot查询,也适用于连续查询.实验结果证明了算法的有效性.     

A system for visual role-based policy modelling

The definition of security policies in information systems and programming applications is often accomplished through traditional low level languages that are difficult to use. This is a remarkable drawback if we consider that security policies are often specified and maintained by top level enterprise managers who would probably prefer to use simplified, metaphor oriented policy management tools.To support all the different kinds of users we propose a suite of visual languages to specify access and security policies according to the role based access control (RBAC) model. Moreover, a system implementing the proposed visual languages is proposed. The system provides a set of tools to enable a user to visually edit security policies and to successively translate them into (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language) code, which can be managed by a Policy Based Management System supporting such policy language.The system and the visual approach have been assessed by means of usability studies and of several case studies. The one presented in this paper regards the configuration of access policies for a multimedia content management platform providing video streaming services also accessible through mobile devices.     

A weighted segment-based caching algorithm for video streaming objects over heterogeneous networking environments

Traditional caching technology is not applicable to cache video streaming objects over heterogeneous networking environments. The popularity of mobile devices in the heterogeneous networking environments make the access of Internet content become a common phenomenon. To support different mobile devices in the heterogeneity networking environments, a transcoding proxy is used to transcode different versions of the streaming videos according to clients’ requests. In this paper, we propose a weighted caching replace strategy for video streaming objects over heterogeneous networking environments. A new caching algorithm with static weight transcoding graph and dynamic caching relation tree is introduced. The proposed algorithm is compared with LRU, LFU, CP and PF cache algorithms in three parts: hit ratio, byte hit ratio, and average transmission delay. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms than traditional LRU, LFU, CP and PF cache algorithms.     

Dynamic replication and synchronization of web services for high availability in mobile ad-hoc networks

Web services are gaining high popularity and importance on mobile devices. Connected to ad-hoc networks, they provide the possibility to establish spontaneously even complex service-based workflows and architectures. However, usually these architectures are only as stable and reliable as the underlying network infrastructure. Since topologies of mobile ad-hoc networks behave unpredictably, dependability within them can be only achieved with a dynamic replication mechanism. In this paper we present a highly flexible solution for replication and synchronization of stateful Web services and discuss the behavior of the implemented prototype in large-scale simulations.     

Distributed Data Mining in Peer-to-Peer Networks

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are gaining popularity in many applications such as file sharing, e-commerce, and social networking, many of which deal with rich, distributed data sources that can benefit from data mining. P2P networks are, in fact,well-suited to distributed data mining (DDM), which deals with the problem of data analysis in environments with distributed data,computing nodes,and users. This article offers an overview of DDM applications and algorithms for P2P environments,focusing particularly on local algorithms that perform data analysis by using computing primitives with limited communication overhead. The authors describe both exact and approximate local P2P data mining algorithms that work in a decentralized and communication-efficient manner.     

Discovery of unusual regional social activities using geo-tagged microblogs

The advent of microblogging services represented by Twitter evidently stirred a popular trend of personal update sharing from all over the world. Furthermore, the recent mobile device and wireless network technologies are greatly expanding the connectivity between people over the social networking sites. Regarding the shared buzzes over the sites as a crowd-sourced database reflecting a various kind of real-world events, we are able to conduct a variety of social analytics using the crowd power in much easier ways. In this paper, we propose a geo-social event detection method by finding out unusually crowded places based on the conception of social networking sites as a social event detector. In order to detect unusual statuses of a region, we previously construct geographical regularities deduced from geo-tagged microblogs. Especially, we utilize a large number of geo-tagged Twitter messages which are collected by means of our own tweets acquisition method in terms of geographic relevancy. By comparing to those regularities, we decide if there are any unusual events happening in monitoring geographical areas. Finally, we describe the experimental results to evaluate the proposed unusuality detection method on the basis of geographical regularities which are computed from a large number of real geo-tagged tweet dataset around Japan.     

Providing user context for mobile and social networking applications

The processing capabilities of mobile devices coupled with portable and wearable sensors provide the basis for new context-aware services and applications tailored to the user environment and daily activities. In this article, we describe the approach developed within the UPCASE project, which makes use of sensors available in the mobile device as well as sensors externally connected via Bluetooth to provide user contexts. We describe the system architecture from sensor data acquisition to feature extraction, context inference and the publication of context information in web-centered servers that support well-known social networking services. In the current prototype, context inference is based on decision trees to learn and to identify contexts dynamically at run-time, but the middleware allows the integration of different inference engines if necessary. Experimental results in a real-world setting suggest that the proposed solution is a promising approach to provide user context to local mobile applications as well as to network-level applications such as social networking services.     

IFCS: an intelligent fast channel switching in IPTV over PON based on human behavior prediction

In this work we are concerned with detecting non-collaborative videos in video sharing social networks. Specifically, we investigate how much visual content-based analysis can aid in detecting ballot stuffing and spam videos in threads of video responses. That is a very challenging task, because of the high-level semantic concepts involved; of the assorted nature of social networks, preventing the use of constrained a priori information; and, which is paramount, of the context-dependent nature of non-collaborative videos. Content filtering for social networks is an increasingly demanded task: due to their popularity, the number of abuses also tends to increase, annoying the user and disrupting their services. We propose two approaches, each one better adapted to a specific non-collaborative action: ballot stuffing, which tries to inflate the popularity of a given video by giving “fake” responses to it, and spamming, which tries to insert a non-related video as a response in popular videos. We endorse the use of low-level features combined into higher-level features representation, like bag-of-visual-features and latent semantic analysis. Our experiments show the feasibility of the proposed approaches.     

A resource allocation policy for delay minimization in fetching capacitated feeds

As social media services such as Twitter and Facebook are gaining popularity, the amount of information published from those services is explosively growing. Most of them use feeds to facilitate distribution of a huge volume of content they publish. In this context, many users subscribe to feeds to acquire up-to-date information through feed aggregation services, and recent real-time search engines also increasingly utilize feeds to promptly find recent web content when it is produced. Accordingly, it is necessary for such services to effectively fetch feeds for minimizing fetching delay, while at the same time maximizing the number of fetched entries. Fetching delay is a time lag between entry publication and retrieval, which is primarily incurred by finiteness of fetching resources. In this paper, we consider a polling-based approach among the methods applicable to fetching feeds, which bases on a specific schedule for visiting feeds. While the existing polling-based approaches have focused on the allocation of fetching resources to feeds in order to either reduce the fetching delay or increase the number of fetched entries, we propose a resource allocation policy that can optimize both objectives. Extensive experiments have been carried out to evaluate the proposed model, in comparison with the existing alternative methods.     

Movement prediction based cooperative caching for location dependent information service in mobile ad hoc networks

Location Dependent Information Services (LDISs), through which mobile clients can access location sensitive data such as weather information, traffic reports, and local news, are gaining increasing popularity in recent years. Due to limited client power and intermittent connectivity, caching is an important approach to improve the performance of LDISs. In this paper, we propose a cache replacement policy called Location Dependent Cooperative Caching (LDCC). Unlike existing location dependent cache replacement policies, the LDCC strategy applies a prediction model to approximate client movement behavior and a probabilistic transition model to analyze the communication cost. These models are used in the design of a cache replacement policy to improve system overall performance. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed strategy significantly outperforms existing caching policies in providing LDIS in mobile ad hoc networks.     

Contextualized mobile recommendation service based on interactive social network discovered from mobile users

Personal context is the most significant information for providing contextualized mobile recommendation services at a certain time and place. However, it is very difficult for service providers to be aware of the personal contexts, because each person’s activities and preferences are very ambiguous and depending on numerous unknown factors. In order to deal with this problem, we have focused on discovering social relationships (e.g., family, friends, colleagues and so on) between people. We have assumed that the personal context of a certain person is interrelated with those of other people, and investigated how to employ his neighbor’s contexts, which possibly have a meaningful influence on his personal context. It indicates that we have to discover implicit social networks which express the contextual dependencies between people. Thereby, in this paper, we propose an interactive approach to build meaningful social networks by interacting with human experts. Given a certain social relation (e.g., isFatherOf), this proposed systems can evaluate a set of conditions (which are represented as propositional axioms) asserted from the human experts, and show them a social network resulted from data mining tools. More importantly, social network ontology has been exploited to consistently guide them by proving whether the conditions are logically verified, and to refine the discovered social networks. We expect these social network is applicable to generate context-based recommendation services. In this research project, we have applied the proposed system to discover the social networks between mobile users by collecting a dataset from about two millions of users.     

Mobile botnets meet social networks: design and analysis of a new type of botnet

International Journal of Information Security - The ubiquitous nature of smartphone services and the popularity of online social networking can be a lethal combination that spreads malware and...     

Programmable mobile networks

Existing mobile systems (e.g., mobile IP, mobile ATM and third generation cellular systems) lack the intrinsic architectural flexibility to deal with the complexity of supporting adaptive mobile applications in wireless and mobile environments. We believe that there is a need to develop alternative network architectures from the existing ones to deal with the demands placed on underlying mobile signalling, adaptation management and wireless transport systems in support of new mobile services, e.g. interactive multimedia and web access. In this paper we present the design, implementation and evaluation of mobiware, a middleware technology that enables the introduction of new services in mobile networks. Mobiware provides a toolkit that service providers can utilize to build services that can dynamically exploit the intrinsic scalable properties of mobile multimedia applications in response to time-varying mobile network conditions. Based on an open programmable networking paradigm, mobiware runs on mobile devices, wireless access points and mobile-capable switch/routers providing a set of open programmable interfaces and distributed objects for adaptive mobile networking. Mobiware is software-intensive and is built on CORBA and Java distributed object technologies. The source code for mobiware v1.0 is freely available (comet.columbia.edu/mobiware) for experimentation.     

Online role mining for context-aware mobile service recommendation

Finding and recommending suitable services for mobile devices are increasingly important due to the popularity of mobile Internet. While recent research has attempted to use role-based approaches to recommend services, role discovery is still an ongoing research topic. Using role-based approaches, popular mobile services can be recommended to other members in the same role group in a context- dependent manner. This paper proposes several role mining algorithms, to suit different application requirements, that automatically group users according to their interests and habits dynamically. Most importantly, we propose an online role mining algorithm that can discover role patterns efficiently and incrementally. Finally, we present a complete, question-based framework that can efficiently perform role mining for context-aware service recommendation in a mobile environment—where a device may not be always connected to the server and/or scalability of the role mining algorithm running on the server is critical.     

面向移动网的P2P Web Service自组网协同通信平台

要：提出一种采用移动P2P Web Service技术的自组网协同通信平台SNCC（Self-organizing Networking Cooperative Communication）,目标是利用移动终端天然的分布式特点,通过手机的自组网,支持手机之间的协同通信;为了克服现有移动网络的漫游性,带宽的局限性,通过自组网协同通信控制器,基于目前移动网络支持的网络协议（UDP/TCP）,实现针对移动网络的自组网协同通信功能。