Search results for " Social Network"
showing 10 items of 122 documents
Evaluating the impact of friends in predicting user’s availability in online social networks
2017
In recent years, Online Social Networks (OSNs) have changed the way people connect and interact with each other. Indeed, most people have registered an account on some popular OSNs (such as Facebook, or Google+) which is used to access the system at different times of the days, depending on their life and habits. In this context, understanding how users connect to the OSNs is of paramount importance for both the protection of their privacy and the OSN’s provider (or third-party applications) that want to exploit this information. In this paper, we study the task of predicting the availability status (online/offline) of the OSNs’ users by exploiting the availability information of their frie…
Empirically-derived subgroups of Facebook users and their association with personality characteristics: a Latent Class Analysis
2018
Abstract In recent years, considerable research effort has been directed at the identification of relationships between psychological variables and Facebook usage indicators. However, the identification of homogeneous subgroups of individuals based on similar Facebook usage characteristics still presents a challenge. This study aims: (1) to empirically determine homogeneous groups of Facebook users based on variables regarding their personal experience on Facebook, by using a Latent Class Analysis; and (2) to examine the association between an individual's personality and interpersonal characteristics and the empirically-derived profiles of Facebook usage. Eight hundred and eleven Facebook …
Disrupting resilient criminal networks through data analysis: The case of Sicilian Mafia
2020
Compared to other types of social networks, criminal networks present hard challenges, due to their strong resilience to disruption, which poses severe hurdles to law-enforcement agencies. Herein, we borrow methods and tools from Social Network Analysis to (i) unveil the structure of Sicilian Mafia gangs, based on two real-world datasets, and (ii) gain insights as to how to efficiently disrupt them. Mafia networks have peculiar features, due to the links distribution and strength, which makes them very different from other social networks, and extremely robust to exogenous perturbations. Analysts are also faced with the difficulty in collecting reliable datasets that accurately describe the…
Whom to befriend to influence people
2020
Alice wants to join a new social network, and influence its members to adopt a new product or idea. Each person $v$ in the network has a certain threshold $t(v)$ for {\em activation}, i.e adoption of the product or idea. If $v$ has at least $t(v)$ activated neighbors, then $v$ will also become activated. If Alice wants to activate the entire social network, whom should she befriend? More generally, we study the problem of finding the minimum number of links that a set of external influencers should form to people in the network, in order to activate the entire social network. This {\em Minimum Links} Problem has applications in viral marketing and the study of epidemics. Its solution can be…
Fake news and infodemia at the time of covid-19
2020
The essay has as its object fake news and excess of pieces of information with particular attention to the pandemic emergency we are currently living: COVID-19. After a careful consideration about what fake news actually are, the paper analyzes the pitfalls concerning the communication through virtual technologies, where social networks let the news reach the user only if they pass some requirements, in order to give the user a personalized experience of being informed. As a result, the profiling process traps the user in a cage, which is a paradox, because the internet it’s literally supposed to be without borders and barriers. The current crisis caused by the global pandemic has brought t…
Social Network Analysis of Sicilian Mafia Interconnections
2019
In this paper, we focus on the study of Sicilian Mafia organizations through Social Network Analysis. We analyse datasets reflecting two different Mafia Families, based on examinations of digital trails and judicial documents, respectively. The first dataset includes the phone calls logs among suspected individuals. The second one is based on police traces of meeting that have taken place among different types of criminals. Our breakthrough is twofold. First in the method followed to generate these new datasets. Second, in the method used to carry out a quantitative phenomena investigation that are hard to evaluate. Our networks are weighted ones, with each weight catching the frequency of …
Forma mentis networks map how nursing and engineering students enhance their mindsets about innovation and health during professional growth
2020
Reconstructing a “forma mentis”, a mindset, and its changes, means capturing how individuals perceive topics, trends and experiences over time. To this aim we use forma mentis networks (FMNs), which enable direct, microscopic access to how individuals conceptually perceive knowledge and sentiment around a topic, providing richer contextual information than machine learning. FMNs build cognitive representations of stances through psycholinguistic tools like conceptual associations from semantic memory (free associations, i.e., one concept eliciting another) and affect norms (valence, i.e., how attractive a concept is). We test FMNs by investigating how Norwegian nursing and engineering stude…
Georeferenziazione e spazi del commercio: una prospettiva culturale
2017
Il lavoro è incentrato sull'uso della georeferenziazione a fini commerciali per la costruzione del geo-marketing.
A fog-assisted system to defend against Sybils in vehicular crowdsourcing
2022
Technological advancements in vehicular transportation systems have led to the growth of novel paradigms, in which vehicles and infrastructures collaborate to infer high-level knowledge about phenomena of interest. Vehicular Social Network (VSN) is one such paradigm in which vehicular network entities are considered as part of an Online Social Network (OSN), paving the way for new services derived from social context. Although vehicular crowdsourcing has tremendous benefits, its deployment in real systems requires to solve important challenges including defense against Sybil attacks. This paper proposes a novel fog-assisted system that uses SybilDriver to minimize the presence of Sybil enti…
Prevention of hate speech crimes: digital versus real-life environment
2022
Extending the use of social media and other digital networks, as well as technology development and the impact of the pandemic have raised the problem of how to prevent hateful speech from occurring. Limitations on hate speech closely correlate with restriction of freedom of speech, therefore balance between the two should be met to ensure both fundamental democratic right on the freedom of speech, as well as to restrict limitations on one’s honour, dignity and safety. To answer whether mechanisms for combating the crimes of hate speech in the digital environment are as effective as they are in a real-life situation, the author analyses the international (United Nations) and Council of Euro…