We describe our work in the collection and analysis of massive data describing the connections between participants to online social networks. Alternative approaches to social network data collection are defined and evaluated in practice, against the popular Facebook Web site. Thanks to our ad-hoc, privacy-compliant crawlers, two large samples, comprising millions of connections, have been collected; the data is anonymous and organized as an undirected graph. We describe a set of tools that we developed to analyze specific properties of such social-network graphs, i.e., among others, degree distribution, centrality measures, scaling laws and distribution of friendship.
In this paper we describe in details several results, some of them already presented in a preliminary work @cite_14 based on a significantly smaller sample acquired with a naive technique.
@cite_14
1600978165
A new face anti-spoofing method based on general image quality assessment is presented. The proposed approach presents a very low degree of complexity which makes it suitable for real-time applications, using 14 image quality features extracted from one image (i.e., the same acquired for face recognition purposes) to distinguish between legitimate and impostor samples. The experimental results, obtained on two publicly available datasets, show very competitive results compared to other state-of-the-art methods tested on the same benchmarks. The findings presented in the work clearly suggest that the analysis of the general image quality of real face samples reveals highly valuable information that may be very efficiently used to discriminate them from fake images. Game tree search in games with large branching factors is a notoriously hard problem. In this paper, we address this problem with a new sampling strategy for Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithms, called Naive Sampling, based on a variant of the Multi-armed Bandit problem called the Combinatorial Multi-armed Bandit (CMAB) problem. We present a new MCTS algorithm based on Naive Sampling called NaiveMCTS, and evaluate it in the context of real-time strategy (RTS) games. Our results show that as the branching factor grows, NaiveMCTS performs significantly better than other algorithms. Decentralized MDPs provide a powerful formal framework for planning in multi-agent systems, but the complexity of the model limits its usefulness. We study in this paper a class of DEC-MDPs that restricts the interactions between the agents to a structured, event-driven dependency. These dependencies can model locking a shared resource or temporal enabling constraints, both of which arise frequently in practice. The complexity of this class of problems is shown to be no harder than exponential in the number of states and doubly exponential in the number of dependencies. Since the number of dependencies is much smaller than the number of states for many problems, this is significantly better than the doubly exponential (in the state space) complexity of DEC-MDPs. We also demonstrate how an algorithm we previously developed can be used to solve problems in this class both optimally and approximately. Experimental work indicates that this solution technique is significantly faster than a naive policy search approach. A citing sentence is one that appears in a scientific article and cites previous work. Citing sentences have been studied and used in many applications. For example, they have been used in scientific paper summarization, automatic survey generation, paraphrase identification, and citation function classification. Citing sentences that cite multiple papers are common in scientific writing. This observation should be taken into consideration when using citing sentences in applications. For instance, when a citing sentence is used in a summary of a scientific paper, only the fragments of the sentence that are relevant to the summarized paper should be included in the summary. In this paper, we present and compare three different approaches for identifying the fragments of a citing sentence that are related to a given target reference. Our methods are: word classification, sequence labeling, and segment classification. Our experiments show that segment classification achieves the best results.