Query: Automated Linguistic Analysis of Deceptive and Truthful Synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication

Relevant passages:
Cues to deception. <=SEP=> Do people behave differently when they are lying compared with when they are telling the truth? The combined results of 1,338 estimates of 158 cues to deception are reported. Results show that in some ways, liars are less forthcoming than truth tellers, and they tell less compelling tales. They also make a more negative impression and are more tense. Their stories include fewer ordinary imperfections and unusual contents. However, many behaviors showed no discernible links, or only weak links, to deceit. Cues to deception were more pronounced when people were motivated to succeed, especially when the motivations were identity relevant rather than monetary or material. Cues to deception were also stronger when lies were about transgressions.

Deception and design: the impact of communication technology on lying behavior <=SEP=> Social psychology has demonstrated that lying is an important, and frequent, part of everyday social interactions. As communication technologies become more ubiquitous in our daily interactions, an important question for developers is to determine how the design of these technologies affects lying behavior. The present research reports the results of a diary study, in which participants recorded all of their social interactions and lies for seven days. The data reveal that participants lied most on the telephone and least in email, and that lying rates in face-to-face and instant messaging interactions were approximately equal. This pattern of results suggests that the design features of communication technologies (e.g., synchronicity, recordability, and copresence) affect lying behavior in important ways, and that these features must be considered by both designers and users when issues of deception and trust arise. The implications for designing applications that increase, decrease or detect deception are discussed.

Psychological aspects of natural language. use: our words, our selves. <=SEP=> The words people use in their daily lives can reveal important aspects of their social and psychological worlds. With advances in computer technology, text analysis allows researchers to reliably and quickly assess features of what people say as well as subtleties in their linguistic styles. Following a brief review of several text analysis programs, we summarize some of the evidence that links natural word use to personality, social and situational fluctuations, and psychological interventions. Of particular interest are findings that point to the psychological value of studying particles-parts of speech that include pronouns, articles, prepositions, conjunctives, and auxiliary verbs. Particles, which serve as the glue that holds nouns and regular verbs together, can serve as markers of emotional state, social identity, and cognitive styles.

Testing the Interactivity Model: Communication Processes, Partner Assessments, and the Quality of Collaborative Work <=SEP=> EE K. BuRGOON IS Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for the Management of Information at the University of Arizona. She is the author or coauthor of seven books and nearly two hundred articles and chapters on topics related to interpersonal and nonverbal communication, deception and credibility, mass media, and new communication technologies. Her current research focuses on interactivity, adaptation, and attunement in communication.

Male and Female Spoken Language Differences : Stereotypes and Evidence <=SEP=> Male speech and female speech have been observed to differ in their form, topic, content, and use. Early writers were largely introspective in their analyses; more recent work has begun to provide empirical evidence. Men may be more loquacious and directive; they use more nonstandard forms, talk more about sports, money, and business, and more frequently refer to time, space, quantity, destructive action, perceptual attributes, physical movements, and objects. Women are often more supportive, polite, and expressive, talk more about home and family, and use more words implying feeling, evaluation, interpretation, and psychological state. A comprehensive theory of "genderlect" must include information about linguistic features under a multiplicity of conditions.

Study of Deep Learning Techniques for Side-Channel Analysis and Introduction to ASCAD Database <=SEP=> To provide insurance on the resistance of a system against side-channel analysis, several national or private schemes are today promoting an evaluation strategy, common in classical cryptography, which is focussing on the most powerful adversary who may train to learn about the dependency between the device behaviour and the sensitive data values. Several works have shown that this kind of analysis, known as Template Attacks in the side-channel domain, can be rephrased as a classical Machine Learning classification problem with learning phase. Following the current trend in the latter area, recent works have demonstrated that deep learning algorithms were very efficient to conduct security evaluations of embedded systems and had many advantages compared to the other methods. Unfortunately, their hyper-parametrization has often been kept secret by the authors who only discussed on the main design principles and on the attack efficiencies. This is clearly an important limitation of previous works since (1) the latter parametrization is known to be a challenging question in Machine Learning and (2) it does not allow for the reproducibility of the presented results. This paper aims to address these limitations in several ways. First, completing recent works, we propose a comprehensive study of deep learning algorithms when applied in the context of side-channel analysis and we discuss the links with the classical template attacks. Secondly, we address the question of the choice of the hyper-parameters for the class of multi-layer perceptron networks and convolutional neural networks. Several benchmarks and rationales are given in the context of the analysis of a masked implementation of the AES algorithm. To enable perfect reproducibility of our tests, this work also introduces an open platform including all the sources of the target implementation together with the campaign of electromagnetic measurements exploited in our benchmarks. This open database, named ASCAD, has been specified to serve as a common basis for further works on this subject. Our work confirms the conclusions made by Cagli et al. at CHES 2017 about the high potential of convolutional neural networks. Interestingly, it shows that the approach followed to design the algorithm VGG-16 used for image recognition seems also to be sound when it comes to fix an architecture for side-channel analysis.

Mnemonic Descent Method: A Recurrent Process Applied for End-to-End Face Alignment <=SEP=> Cascaded regression has recently become the method of choice for solving non-linear least squares problems such as deformable image alignment. Given a sizeable training set, cascaded regression learns a set of generic rules that are sequentially applied to minimise the least squares problem. Despite the success of cascaded regression for problems such as face alignment and head pose estimation, there are several shortcomings arising in the strategies proposed thus far. Specifically, (a) the regressors are learnt independently, (b) the descent directions may cancel one another out and (c) handcrafted features (e.g., HoGs, SIFT etc.) are mainly used to drive the cascade, which may be sub-optimal for the task at hand. In this paper, we propose a combined and jointly trained convolutional recurrent neural network architecture that allows the training of an end-to-end to system that attempts to alleviate the aforementioned drawbacks. The recurrent module facilitates the joint optimisation of the regressors by assuming the cascades form a nonlinear dynamical system, in effect fully utilising the information between all cascade levels by introducing a memory unit that shares information across all levels. The convolutional module allows the network to extract features that are specialised for the task at hand and are experimentally shown to outperform hand-crafted features. We show that the application of the proposed architecture for the problem of face alignment results in a strong improvement over the current state-of-the-art.

BigDataScript: a scripting language for data pipelines <=SEP=> MOTIVATION
The analysis of large biological datasets often requires complex processing pipelines that run for a long time on large computational infrastructures. We designed and implemented a simple script-like programming language with a clean and minimalist syntax to develop and manage pipeline execution and provide robustness to various types of software and hardware failures as well as portability.


RESULTS
We introduce the BigDataScript (BDS) programming language for data processing pipelines, which improves abstraction from hardware resources and assists with robustness. Hardware abstraction allows BDS pipelines to run without modification on a wide range of computer architectures, from a small laptop to multi-core servers, server farms, clusters and clouds. BDS achieves robustness by incorporating the concepts of absolute serialization and lazy processing, thus allowing pipelines to recover from errors. By abstracting pipeline concepts at programming language level, BDS simplifies implementation, execution and management of complex bioinformatics pipelines, resulting in reduced development and debugging cycles as well as cleaner code.


AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION
BigDataScript is available under open-source license at http://pcingola.github.io/BigDataScript.

Implicit and Explicit Stereotyping of Adolescents <=SEP=> Although adolescents are commonly assumed to be rebellious, risky and moody, two experiments demonstrate for the first time that these beliefs operate both explicitly and implicitly as stereotypes. In Experiment 1, participants (a) explicitly endorsed adolescent stereotypes and (b) implicitly associated adolescent stereotyped words more rapidly with the adolescent than the adult social category. Individual differences in the explicit endorsement of adolescent stereotypes predicted explicit perceptions of the rebelliousness of a 17-year-old but not a 71-year-old, although individual differences in implicit stereotyping did not. Identification with adults was associated with greater implicit stereotyping but not explicit stereotyping. In Experiment 2, subliminal exposure to adolescent stereotyped words increased subsequent perceptions of the rebelliousness of a 17-year-old but not a 71-year-old. Although individual differences in implicit adolescent stereotyping did not predict explicit evaluations of adolescents, stereotypes of adolescents nevertheless influenced explicit evaluations unconsciously and unintentionally.

Rain Streak Removal Using Layer Priors <=SEP=> This paper addresses the problem of rain streak removal from a single image. Rain streaks impair visibility of an image and introduce undesirable interference that can severely affect the performance of computer vision algorithms. Rain streak removal can be formulated as a layer decomposition problem, with a rain streak layer superimposed on a background layer containing the true scene content. Existing decomposition methods that address this problem employ either dictionary learning methods or impose a low rank structure on the appearance of the rain streaks. While these methods can improve the overall visibility, they tend to leave too many rain streaks in the background image or over-smooth the background image. In this paper, we propose an effective method that uses simple patch-based priors for both the background and rain layers. These priors are based on Gaussian mixture models and can accommodate multiple orientations and scales of the rain streaks. This simple approach removes rain streaks better than the existing methods qualitatively and quantitatively. We overview our method and demonstrate its effectiveness over prior work on a number of examples.

The Microfinance Promise <=SEP=> Contributions to this research made by a member of The Financial Access Initiative.

You are what you like! Information leakage through users' Interests <=SEP=> Suppose that a Facebook user, whose age is hidden or missing, likes Britney Spears. Can you guess his/her age? Knowing that most Britney fans are teenagers, it is fairly easy for humans to answer this question. Interests (or “likes”) of users is one of the highly-available on-line information. In this paper, we show how these seemingly harmless interests (e.g., music interests) can leak privacysensitive information about users. In particular, we infer their undisclosed (private) attributes using the public attributes of other users sharing similar interests. In order to compare user-defined interest names, we extract their semantics using an ontologized version of Wikipedia and measure their similarity by applying a statistical learning method. Besides self-declared interests in music, our technique does not rely on any further information about users such as friend relationships or group belongings. Our experiments, based on more than 104K public profiles collected from Facebook and more than 2000 private profiles provided by volunteers, show that our inference technique efficiently predicts attributes that are very often hidden by users. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that user interests are used for profiling, and more generally, semantics-driven inference of private data is addressed.

Automated Method for Discrimination of Arrhythmias Using Time, Frequency, and Nonlinear Features of Electrocardiogram Signals <=SEP=> We developed an automated approach to differentiate between different types of arrhythmic episodes in electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, because, in real-life scenarios, a software application does not know in advance the type of arrhythmia a patient experiences. Our approach has four main stages: (1) Classification of ventricular fibrillation (VF) versus non-VF segments—including atrial fibrillation (AF), ventricular tachycardia (VT), normal sinus rhythm (NSR), and sinus arrhythmias, such as bigeminy, trigeminy, quadrigeminy, couplet, triplet—using four image-based phase plot features, one frequency domain feature, and the Shannon entropy index. (2) Classification of AF versus non-AF segments. (3) Premature ventricular contraction (PVC) detection on every non-AF segment, using a time domain feature, a frequency domain feature, and two features that characterize the nonlinearity of the data. (4) Determination of the PVC patterns, if present, to categorize distinct types of sinus arrhythmias and NSR. We used the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Beth Israel Hospital (MIT-BIH) arrhythmia database, Creighton University’s VT arrhythmia database, the MIT-BIH atrial fibrillation database, and the MIT-BIH malignant ventricular arrhythmia database to test our algorithm. Binary decision tree (BDT) and support vector machine (SVM) classifiers were used in both stage 1 and stage 3. We also compared our proposed algorithm’s performance to other published algorithms. Our VF detection algorithm was accurate, as in balanced datasets (and unbalanced, in parentheses) it provided an accuracy of 95.1% (97.1%), sensitivity of 94.5% (91.1%), and specificity of 94.2% (98.2%). The AF detection was accurate, as the sensitivity and specificity in balanced datasets (and unbalanced, in parentheses) were found to be 97.8% (98.6%) and 97.21% (97.1%), respectively. Our PVC detection algorithm was also robust, as the accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity were found to be 99% (98.1%), 98.0% (96.2%), and 98.4% (99.4%), respectively, for balanced and (unbalanced) datasets.

An Algebra and Equivalences to Transform Graph Patterns in Neo4j <=SEP=> Modern query optimizers of relational database systems embody more than three decades of research and practice in the area of data management and processing. Key advances include algebraic query transformation, intelligent search space pruning, and modular optimizer architectures. Surprisingly, many of these contributions seem to have been overlooked in the emerging field of graph databases so far. In particular, we believe that query optimization based on a general graph algebra and its equivalences can greatly improve on the current state of the art. Although some graph algebras have already been proposed, they have often been developed in a context, in which a relational database system is used as a backend to process graph data. As a consequence, these algebras are typically tightly coupled to the relational algebra, making them unsuitable for native graph databases. While we support the approach of extending the relational algebra, we argue that graph-specific operations should be defined at a higher level, independent of the database backend. In this paper, we introduce such a general graph algebra and corresponding equivalences. We demonstrate how it can be used to optimize Cypher queries in the setting of the Neo4j native graph database.

Information theory and neural coding <=SEP=> Information theory quantifies how much information a neural response carries about the stimulus. This can be compared to the information transferred in particular models of the stimulus–response function and to maximum possible information transfer. Such comparisons are crucial because they validate assumptions present in any neurophysiological analysis. Here we review information-theory basics before demonstrating its use in neural coding. We show how to use information theory to validate simple stimulus–response models of neural coding of dynamic stimuli. Because these models require specification of spike timing precision, they can reveal which time scales contain information in neural coding. This approach shows that dynamic stimuli can be encoded efficiently by single neurons and that each spike contributes to information transmission. We argue, however, that the data obtained so far do not suggest a temporal code, in which the placement of spikes relative to each other yields additional information.

ANE: Network Embedding via Adversarial Autoencoders <=SEP=> Network embedding is an important method to learn low-dimensional representations of vertexes in network, whose goal is to capture and preserve the highly non-linear network structures. Here, we propose an Adversarial autoencoders based Network Embedding method (ANE for short), which utilizes the rencently proposed adversarial autoencoders to perform variational inference by matching the aggregated posterior of low-dimensional representations of vertexes with an arbitraray prior distribution. This framework introduces adversarial regularization to autoencoders. And it is able to attaches the latent representations of similar vertexes to each other and thus prevents the manifold fracturing problem that is typically encountered in the embeddings learnt by the autoencoders. Experiments demonstrate the effictiveness of ANE on link prediction and multi-label classification on three real-world information networks.

Multiview projectors/cameras system for 3D reconstruction of dynamic scenes <=SEP=> Active vision systems are usually limited to either partial or static scene reconstructions. In this paper, we propose to acquire the entire 3D shape of a dynamic scene. This is performed using a multiple projectors and cameras system, that allows to recover the entire shape of the object within a single scan at each frame. Like previous approaches, a static and simple pattern is used to avoid interferences of multiple patterns projected on the same object. In this paper, we extend the technique to capture a dense entire shape of a moving object with accuracy and high video frame rate. To achieve this, we mainly propose two additional steps; one is checking the consistency between the multiple cameras and projectors, and the other is an algorithm for light sectioning based on a plane parameter optimization. In addition, we also propose efficient noise reduction and mesh generation algorithm which are necessary for practical applications. In the experiments, we show that we can successfully reconstruct dense entire shapes of moving objects. Results are illustrated on real data from a system composed of six projectors and six cameras that was actually built.

Using Machine Learning to Break Visual Human Interaction Proofs (HIPs) <=SEP=> Machine learning is often used to automatically solve human tasks. In this paper, we look for tasks where machine learning algorithms are not as good as humans with the hope of gaining insight into their current limitations. We studied various Human Interactive Proofs (HIPs) on the market, because they are systems designed to tell computers and humans apart by posing challenges presumably too hard for computers. We found that most HIPs are pure recognition tasks which can easily be broken using machine learning. The harder HIPs use a combination of segmentation and recognition tasks. From this observation, we found that building segmentation tasks is the most effective way to confuse machine learning algorithms. This has enabled us to build effective HIPs (which we deployed in MSN Passport), as well as design challenging segmentation tasks for machine learning algorithms.

Area-efficient cross-coupled charge pump for on-chip solar cell <=SEP=> In this paper, an area-efficient cross-coupled charge pump for standalone chip using on-chip solar cell is proposed. The proposed cross-coupled charge pump outputs higher voltage than conventional cross-coupled charge pump on the same area by adding capacitors to drive MOS transistors. The proposed circuit is fabricated in 0.18um standard CMOS process, and outputs 80mV higher than the conventional circuit with 500mV input and 100kHz clock frequency.

An introduction to ROC analysis <=SEP=> Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) graphs are useful for organizing classifiers and visualizing their performance. ROC graphs are commonly used in medical decision making, and in recent years have been used increasingly in machine learning and data mining research. Although ROC graphs are apparently simple, there are some common misconceptions and pitfalls when using them in practice. The purpose of this article is to serve as an introduction to ROC graphs and as a guide for using them in research. 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Sentiment Intensity Ranking among Adjectives Using Sentiment Bearing Word Embeddings <=SEP=> Identification of intensity ordering among polar (positive or negative) words which have the same semantics can lead to a finegrained sentiment analysis. For example, master, seasoned and familiar point to different intensity levels, though they all convey the same meaning (semantics), i.e., expertise: having a good knowledge of. In this paper, we propose a semisupervised technique that uses sentiment bearing word embeddings to produce a continuous ranking among adjectives that share common semantics. Our system demonstrates a strong Spearman’s rank correlation of 0.83 with the gold standard ranking. We show that sentiment bearing word embeddings facilitate a more accurate intensity ranking system than other standard word embeddings (word2vec and GloVe). Word2vec is the state-of-the-art for intensity ordering task.

Does the Fragrance of Essential Oils Alleviate the Fatigue Induced by Exercise? A Biochemical Indicator Test in Rats <=SEP=> Objective
To study the effect of the essential oils of Citrus sinensis L., Mentha piperita L., Syzygium aromaticum L., and Rosmarinus officinalis L. on physical exhaustion in rats.


Methods
Forty-eight male Wistar rats were randomly divided into a control group, a fatigue group, an essential oil mixture (EOM) group, and a peppermint essential oil (PEO) group. Loaded swimming to exhaustion was used as the rat fatigue model. Two groups were nebulized with EOM and PEO after swimming, and the others were nebulized with distilled water. After continuous inhalation for 3 days, the swimming time, blood glucose, blood lactic acid (BLA), blood urea nitrogen (BUN), superoxide dismutase (SOD), glutathione peroxidase (GSH-PX), and malondialdehyde (MDA) in blood were determined.


Results
While an increased time to exhaustion and SOD activity were apparent in both the EOM and PEO groups, the BLA and MDA were lower in both groups, in comparison with the fatigue group, and the changes in the EOM group were more dramatic. Additionally, the EOM group also showed marked changes of the rise of blood glucose and the decrease of BUN and GSH-PX.


Conclusion
The results suggested that the inhalation of an essential oil mixture could powerfully relieve exercise-induced fatigue.

Addressing Function Approximation Error in Actor-Critic Methods <=SEP=> In value-based reinforcement learning methods such as deep Q-learning, function approximation errors are known to lead to overestimated value estimates and suboptimal policies. We show that this problem persists in an actor-critic setting and propose novel mechanisms to minimize its effects on both the actor and the critic. Our algorithm builds on Double Q-learning, by taking the minimum value between a pair of critics to limit overestimation. We draw the connection between target networks and overestimation bias, and suggest delaying policy updates to reduce per-update error and further improve performance. We evaluate our method on the suite of OpenAI gym tasks, outperforming the state of the art in every environment tested.

Design and Optimization of OpenFOAM-based CFD Applications for Modern Hybrid and Heterogeneous HPC Platforms <=SEP=> Design and Optimization of OpenFOAM-based CFD Applications for Modern Hybrid and Heterogeneous HPC Platforms Amani AlOnazi The progress of high performance computing platforms is dramatic, and most of the simulations carried out on these platforms result in improvements on one level, yet expose shortcomings of current CFD packages capabilities. Therefore, hardwareaware design and optimizations are crucial towards exploiting modern computing resources. This thesis proposes optimizations aimed at accelerating numerical simulations, which are illustrated in OpenFOAM solvers. A hybrid MPI and GPGPU parallel conjugate gradient linear solver has been designed and implemented to solve the sparse linear algebraic kernel that derives from two CFD solver: icoFoam, which is an incompressible flow solver, and laplacianFoam, which solves the Poisson equation, for e.g., thermal diffusion. A load-balancing step is applied using heterogeneous decomposition, which decomposes the computations taking into account the performance of each computing device and seeking to minimize communication. In addition, we implemented the recently developed pipeline conjugate gradient as an algorithmic improvement, and parallelized it using MPI, GPGPU, and a hybrid technique. While many questions of ultimately attainable per node performance and multi-node scaling remain, the experimental results show that the hybrid implementation of both solvers significantly outperforms state-of-the-art implementations of a widely used open source package.

Benchmark of a large scale database for facial beauty prediction <=SEP=> Due to its indefinite evaluation criterion, facial beauty analysis has shown its challenges in pattern recognition and biometric recognition. Plenty of methods have been designed for solving this problem, but there are still various limitations. Most of the available research results in this field are achieved on a small-scale facial beauty database which is difficult in modeling the structure information for facial beauty. And majority of the presented facial beauty prediction algorithm requires burden landmark or expensive optimization procedure. In this paper, we have established a large scale facial beauty database named LSFBD, which is a new database for facial beauty analysis. The LSFBD database contains 20000 labeled images, which has 10000 unconstrained male subjects and 10000 unconstrained female subjects separately, and all images are verified with well-designed rating with average scores and standard deviation. In this database, manually adding the extreme beauty images make the distribution more reasonable and the result more accurate. CRBM or Eigenfaces results are presented in the paper as benchmark for evaluating the task of facial beauty prediction.

The Distributed Computing Paradigms: P2P, Grid, Cluster, Cloud, and Jungle <=SEP=> The distributed computing is done on many systems to solve a large scale problem. The growing of high-speed broadband networks in developed and developing countries, the continual increase in computing power, and the rapid growth of the Internet have changed the way. In it the society manages information and information services. Historically, the state of computing has gone through a series of platform and environmental changes. Distributed computing holds great assurance for using computer systems effectively. As a result, supercomputer sites and datacenters have changed from providing high performance floating point computing capabilities to concurrently servicing huge number of requests from billions of users. The distributed computing system uses multiple computers to solve large-scale problems over the Internet. It becomes data-intensive and network-centric. The applications of distributed computing have become increasingly wide-spread. In distributed computing, the main stress is on the large scale resource sharing and always goes for the best performance. In this article, we have reviewed the work done in the area of distributed computing paradigms. The main stress is on the evolving area of cloud computing.

Guide to Health Informatics <=SEP=> From the very earliest moments in the modern history of the computer, scientists have dreamed of creating an " electronic brain ". Of all the modern technological quests, this search to create artificially intelligent (AI) computer systems has been one of the most ambitious and, not surprisingly, controversial. It also seems that very early on, scientists and doctors alike were captivated by the potential such a technology might have in medicine (e.g. Ledley and Lusted, 1959). With intelligent computers able to store and process vast stores of knowledge, the hope was that they would become perfect 'doctors in a box', assisting or surpassing clinicians with tasks like diagnosis. With such motivations, a small but talented community of computer scientists and healthcare professionals set about shaping a research program for a new discipline called Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIM). These researchers had a bold vision of the way AIM would revolutionise medicine, and push forward the frontiers of technology. AI in medicine at that time was a largely US-based research community. Work originated out of a number of campuses, including MIT-Tufts, Pittsburgh, Stanford and Rutgers (e. The field attracted many of the best computer scientists and by any measure their output in the first decade of the field remains a remarkable achievement. In reviewing this new field in 1984, Clancey and Shortliffe provided the following definition: 'Medical artificial intelligence is primarily concerned with the construction of AI programs that perform diagnosis and make therapy recommendations. Unlike medical applications based on other programming methods, such as purely statistical and probabilistic methods, medical AI programs are based on symbolic models of disease entities and their relationship to patient factors and clinical manifestations.' Much has changed since then, and today the importance of diagnosis as a task requiring computer support in routine clinical situations receives much less emphasis (Durinck et al., 1994). The strict focus on the medical setting has now broadened across the healthcare spectrum, and instead of AIM systems, it is more typical to describe them as clinical decision support systems (CDSS). Intelligent systems today are thus found supporting medication prescribing, in clinical laboratories and educational settings, for clinical surveillance, or in data-rich areas like the intensive care setting. While there certainly have been ongoing challenges in developing such systems, they actually have proven their reliability and accuracy on repeated occasions (Shortliffe, 1987). Much of the difficulty experienced in introducing them has …

A sock puppet detection algorithm on virtual spaces <=SEP=> On virtual spaces, some individuals use multiple usernames or copycat/forge other users (usually called ‘‘sock puppet’’) to communicate with others. Those sock puppets are fake identities through which members of Internet community praise or create the illusion of support for the product or one’s work, pretending to be a different person. A fundamental problem is how to identify these sock puppets. In this paper, we propose a sock puppet detection algorithm which combines authorship-identification techniques and link analysis. Firstly, we propose an interesting social network model in which links between two IDs are built if they have similar attitudes to most topics that both of them participate in; then, the edges are pruned according a hypothesis test, which consider the impact of their writing styles; finally, the link-based community detection for pruned network is performed. Compared to traditional methods, our approach has three advantages: (1) it conforms to the practical meanings of sock puppet community; (2) it can be applied in online situation; (3) it increases the efficiency of link analysis. In the experimental work, we evaluate our method using real datasets and compared our approach with several previous methods; the results have proved above advantages. 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

EdgeChain: An Edge-IoT Framework and Prototype Based on Blockchain and Smart Contracts <=SEP=> The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) is facing significant scalability and security challenges. On the one hand, IoT devices are “weak” and need external assistance. Edge computing provides a promising direction addressing the deficiency of centralized cloud computing in scaling massive number of devices. On the other hand, IoT devices are also relatively “vulnerable” facing malicious hackers due to resource constraints. The emerging blockchain and smart contracts technologies bring a series of new security features for IoT and edge computing. In this paper, to address the challenges, we design and prototype an edge-IoT framework named “EdgeChain” based on blockchain and smart contracts. The core idea is to integrate a permissioned blockchain and the internal currency or “coin” system to link the edge cloud resource pool with each IoT device’ account and resource usage, and hence behavior of the IoT devices. EdgeChain uses a credit-based resource management system to control how much resource IoT devices can obtain from edge servers, based on pre-defined rules on priority, application types and past behaviors. Smart contracts are used to enforce the rules and policies to regulate the IoT device behavior in a non-deniable and automated manner. All the IoT activities and transactions are recorded into blockchain for secure data logging and auditing. We implement an EdgeChain prototype and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the ideas. The results show that while gaining the security benefits of blockchain and smart contracts, the cost of integrating them into EdgeChain is within a reasonable and acceptable range.

"Now, i have a body": uses and social norms for mobile remote presence in the workplace <=SEP=> As geographically distributed teams become increasingly common, there are more pressing demands for communication work practices and technologies that support distributed collaboration. One set of technologies that are emerging on the commercial market is mobile remote presence (MRP) systems, physically embodied videoconferencing systems that remote workers use to drive through a workplace, communicating with locals there. Our interviews, observations, and survey results from people, who had 2-18 months of MRP use, showed how remotely-controlled mobility enabled remote workers to live and work with local coworkers almost as if they were physically there. The MRP supported informal communications and connections between distributed coworkers. We also found that the mobile embodiment of the remote worker evoked orientations toward the MRP both as a person and as a machine, leading to formation of new usage norms among remote and local coworkers.