1.

Competitive Bike Competitive Analysis and Popularity Prediction of Bike-Sharing Apps

Using Multi-Source Data
Abstract:
In recent years, bike-sharing systems have been widely deployed in many big cities, which provide
an economical and healthy lifestyle. With the prevalence of bike-sharing systems, a lot of
companies join the bike-sharing market, leading to increasingly fierce competition. To be
competitive, bike-sharing companies and app developers need to make strategic decisions and
predict the popularity of bike-sharing apps. However, existing works mostly focus on predicting
the popularity of a single app, the popularity contest among different apps has not been explored
yet. In this paper, we aim to forecast the popularity contest between Mobike and Ofo, two most
popular bike-sharing apps in China. We develop CompetitiveBike, a system to predict the
popularity contest among bike-sharing apps leveraging multi-source data. We extract two novel
types of features: coarse-grained and fine-grained competitive features, and utilize Random Forest
model to forecast the future competitiveness. In addition, we view mobile apps competition as a
long-term event and generate the event storyline to enrich our competitive analysis. We collect
data about two bike-sharing apps and two food ordering & delivery apps from 11 app stores and
Sina Weibo, implement extensive experimental studies, and the results demonstrate the
effectiveness and generality of our approach.

2. Analysis of Women Safety in Indian Cities Using Machine Learning on Tweets

Abstract:
Women and girls have been experiencing a lot of violence and harassment in public places in
various cities starting from stalking and leading to sexual harassment or sexual assault. This
research paper basically focuses on the role of social media in promoting the safety of women in
Indian cities with special reference to the role of social media websites and applications including
Twitter platform Facebook and Instagram. This paper also focuses on how a sense of responsibility
on part of Indian society can be developed the common Indian people so that we should focus on
the safety of women surrounding them. Tweets on Twitter which usually contains images and text
and also written messages and quotes which focus on the safety of women in Indian cities can be
used to read a message amongst the Indian Youth Culture and educate people to take strict action
and punish those who harass the women. Twitter and other Twitter handles which include hash tag
messages that are widely spread across the whole globe sir as a platform for women to express
their views about how they feel while we go out for work or travel in a public transport and what
is the state of their mind when they are surrounded by unknown men and whether these women
feel safe or not?

3. A Comprehensive Study on Social Network Mental Disorders Detection via Online Social
Media Mining

Abstract:
With the explosive growth in popularity of social networking comes the problematic usage. An
increasing number of social network mental disorders (SNMDs) have been recently noted.
Symptoms of these mental disorders are usually observed passively today, resulting in delayed
clinical intervention. In this paper, we argue that mining online social behavior provides an
opportunity to actively identify SNMDs at an early stage. It is challenging to detect SNMDs
because the mental status cannot be directly observed from online social activity logs. Our
approach, new and innovative to the practice of SNMD detection, does not rely on self-revealing
of those mental factors via questionnaires in Psychology. Instead, we propose a machine learning
framework, namely, Social Network Mental Disorder Detection (SNMDD) that exploits features
extracted from social network data to accurately identify potential cases of SNMDs. The results
manifest that SNMDD is promising for identifying online social network users with potential
SNMDs.

4. Spammer Detection and Fake User Identification on Social Networks (Machine

Learning)

Abstract:
Social networking sites engage millions of users around the world. The users' interactions with
these social sites, such as Twitter and Facebook have a tremendous impact and occasionally
undesirable repercussions for daily life. The prominent social networking sites have turned into a
target platform for the spammers to disperse a huge amount of irrelevant and deleterious
information. Twitter, for example, has become one of the most extravagantly used platforms of all
times and therefore allows an unreasonable amount of spam. Fake users send undesired tweets to
users to promote services or websites that not only affect legitimate users but also disrupt resource
consumption. Moreover, the possibility of expanding invalid information to users through fake
identities has increased that results in the unrolling of harmful content. Recently, the detection of
spammers and identification of fake users on Twitter has become a common area of research in
contemporary online social Networks (OSNs). In this paper, we perform a review of techniques
used for detecting spammers on Twitter. Moreover, a taxonomy of the Twitter spam detection
approaches is presented that classifies the techniques based on their ability to detect: (i) fake
content, (ii) spam based on URL, (iii) spam in trending topics, and (iv) fake users. The presented
techniques are also compared based on various features, such as user features, content features,
graph features, structure features, and time features. We are hopeful that the presented study will
be a useful resource for researchers to find the highlights of recent developments in Twitter spam
detection on a single platform.

5. Detecting Pickpocket Suspects from Large-Scale Public Transit Records (Data Mining)

Abstract:
Massive data collected by automated fare collection (AFC) systems provide opportunities for
studying both personal traveling behaviors and collective mobility patterns in urban areas. Existing
studies on AFC data have primarily focused on identifying passengers' movement patterns.
However, we creatively leveraged such data for identifying pickpocket suspects. Stopping
pickpockets in the public transit system has been crucial for improving passenger satisfaction and
public safety. Nonetheless, in practice, it is challenging to discern thieves from regular passengers.
In this paper, we developed a suspect detection and surveillance system, which can identify
pickpocket suspects based on their daily transit records. Specifically, we first extracted a number
of useful features from each passenger's daily activities in the transit system. Then, we took a two-
step approach that exploits the strengths of unsupervised outlier detection and supervised
classification models to identify thieves, who typically exhibit abnormal traveling behaviors.
Experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of our method. We also developed a prototype
system for potential uses by security personnel.

6. Combining Data Owner-side and Cloud-side Access Control for Encrypted Cloud
Storage (Cloud Computing)
ABSTRACT:
People endorse the great power of cloud computing, but cannot fully trust the cloud providers to
host privacy-sensitive data, due to the absence of user-to-cloud controllability. To ensure
confidentiality, data owners outsource encrypted data instead of plaintexts. To share the encrypted
files with other users, Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-based Encryption (CP-ABE) can be utilized to
conduct fine-grained and owner-centric access control. But this does not sufficiently become
secure against other attacks. Many previous schemes did not grant the cloud provider the capability
to verify whether a downloader can decrypt. Therefore, these files should be available to everyone
accessible to the cloud storage. A malicious attacker can download thousands of files to launch
Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) attacks, which will largely consume the cloud resource.
The payer of the cloud service bears the expense. Besides, the cloud provider serves both as the
accountant and the payee of resource consumption fee, lacking the transparency to data owners.
These concerns should be resolved in real-world public cloud storage. In this paper, we propose a
solution to secure encrypted cloud storages from EDoS attacks and provide resource consumption
accountability. It uses CP-ABE schemes in a black-box manner and complies with arbitrary access
policy of CP-ABE. We present two protocols for different settings, followed by performance and
security analysis.

7. PROVEST: Provenance-based Trust Model for Delay Tolerant Networks (Networking)

ABSTRACT:

Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) are often encountered in military network environments where
end-to-end connectivity is not guaranteed due to frequent disconnection or delay. This work
proposes a provenance-based trust framework, namely PROVEST (PROVEnance-baSed Trust
model) that aims to achieve accurate peer-to-peer trust assessment and maximize the delivery of
correct messages received by destination nodes while minimizing message delay and
communication cost under resource-constrained network environments. Provenance refers to the
history of ownership of a valued object or information. We leverage the interdependency between
trustworthiness of information source and information itself in PROVEST. PROVEST takes a
data-driven approach to reduce resource consumption in the presence of selfish or malicious nodes
while estimating a node’s trust dynamically in response to changes in the environmental and node
conditions. This work adopts a model-based method to evaluate the performance of PROVEST
(i.e., trust accuracy and routing performance) using Stochastic Petri Nets. We conduct a
comparative performance analysis of PROVEST against existing trust-based and non-trust-based
DTN routing protocols to analyze the benefits of PROVEST. We validate PROVEST using a real
dataset of DTN mobility traces.

8. CryptCloud+: Secure and Expressive Data Access Control for Cloud Storage (Cloud
Computing)

ABSTRACT:

Secure cloud storage, which is an emerging cloud service, is designed to protect the confidentiality
of outsourced data but also to provide flexible data access for cloud users whose data is out of
physical control. Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) is regarded as one of
the most promising techniques that may be leveraged to secure the guarantee of the service.
However, the use of CP-ABE may yield an inevitable security breach which is known as the misuse
of access credential (i.e. decryption rights), due to the intrinsic “all-or-nothing” decryption feature
of CP-ABE. In this paper, we investigate the two main cases of access credential misuse: one is
on the semi-trusted authority side, and the other is on the side of cloud user. To mitigate the misuse,
we propose the first accountable authority and revocable CP-ABE based cloud storage system with
white-box traceability and auditing, referred to as CryptCloud+. We also present the security
analysis and further demonstrate the utility of our system via experiments.

9. Traffic and Energy Aware Routing for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks
(Networking)
ABSTRACT:

The energy-efficiency of routing algorithm is crucial for improving the lifetime of battery
constrained Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The consideration of nodes heterogeneity in
routing is essential for achieving optimal resource utilization. This letter considers sensor nodes
with random initial energies and random disparities in data generation rate (traffic) to model a
realistic clustering based WSN suited for heterogeneous sensing applications. The letter presents
an energy model for the scenario and proposes a Traffic and Energy Aware Routing (TEAR)
scheme to improve the stability period. The simulation results indicate that TEAR outperforms
other clustering based routing algorithms under the scenario.
10. NetSpam: A Network-Based Spam Detection Framework for Reviews in Online Social
Media

Abstract:

Nowadays, a big part of people rely on available content in social media in their decisions (e.g.,
reviews and feedback on a topic or product). The possibility that anybody can leave a review
provides a golden opportunity for spammers to write spam reviews about products and services
for different interests. Identifying these spammers and the spam content is a hot topic of research,
and although a considerable number of studies have been done recently toward this end, but so far
the methodologies put forth still barely detect spam reviews, and none of them show the
importance of each extracted feature type. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, named
NetSpam, which utilizes spam features for modeling review data sets as heterogeneous information
networks to map spam detection procedure into a classification problem in such networks. Using
the importance of spam features helps us to obtain better results in terms of different metrics
experimented on real-world review data sets from Yelp and Amazon Web sites. The results show
that NetSpam outperforms the existing methods and among four categories of features, including
review-behavioral, user-behavioral, review-linguistic, and user-linguistic, the first type of features
performs better than the other categories.

11. CoDetect: Financial Fraud Detection With Anomaly Feature Detection

ABSTRACT:

Financial fraud, such as money laundering, is known to be a serious process of crime that makes
illegitimately obtained funds go to terrorism or other criminal activity. This kind of illegal
activities involve complex networks of trade and financial transactions, which makes it difficult to
detect the fraud entities and discover the features of fraud. Fortunately, trading/transaction network
and features of entities in the network can be constructed from the complex networks of the trade
and financial transactions. The trading/transaction network reveals the interaction between entities,
and thus anomaly detection on trading networks can reveal the entities involved in the fraud
activity; while features of entities are the description of entities, and anomaly detection on features
can re_ect details of the fraud activities. Thus, network and features provide complementary
information for fraud detection, which has potential to improve fraud detection performance.
However, the majority of existing methods focus on networks or features information separately,
which does not utilize both information. In this paper, we propose a novel fraud detection
framework, CoDetect, which can leverage both network information and feature information for
financial fraud detection. In addition, the CoDetect can simultaneously detecting financial fraud
activities and the feature patterns associated with the fraud activities. Extensive experiments on
both synthetic data and real-world data demonstrate the efficiency and the effectiveness of the
proposed framework in combating financial fraud, especially for money laundering.

12. MDSClone: Multidimensional Scaling Aided Clone Detection in Internet of Things

Abstract:

Cloning is a very serious threat in the Internet of Things (IoT), owing to the simplicity for an
attacker to gather configuration and authentication credentials from a non-tamper-proof node, and
replicate it in the network. In this paper, we propose MDSClone, a novel clone detection method
based on multidimensional scaling (MDS). MDSClone appears to be very well suited to IoT
scenarios, as it (i) detects clones without the need to know the geographical positions of nodes,
and (ii) unlike prior methods, it can be applied to hybrid networks that comprise both static and
mobile nodes, for which no mobility pattern may be assumed a priori. Moreover, a further
advantage of MDSClone is that (iii) the core part of the detection algorithm can be parallelized,
resulting in an acceleration of the whole detection mechanism. Our thorough analytical and
experimental evaluations demonstrate that MDSClone can achieve a 100% clone detection
probability. Moreover, we propose several modifications to the original MDS calculation, which
lead to over a 75% speed up in large scale scenarios.