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Safebook - an innovative privacy preserving on-line social network

Posted: 07 March 2011

Safebook is an innovative privacy preserving on-line social network.

Unlike other well-known social networking services, Safebook is based on a peer-to-peer architecture, thus avoiding central omniscient entities to store every member's data. Safebook leverages the trust relationships that are part of the social network application itself to cope with the lack of trust and lack of cooperation that are akin to peer-to-peer systems. In this way trusted data storage services, privacy in data access and in data exchange, cooperation among peer nodes are all achieved. Safebook is developed by a member of the SOCIALNETS Consortium, Eurecom.

Fifth IEEE WoWMoM Workshop on Autonomic and Opportunistic Communications (AOC 2011)

Posted: 11 Feb 2011

Fifth IEEE WoWMoM Workshop on Autonomic and Opportunistic Communications (AOC 2011) is jointly organised by SOCIALNETS and SCAMPI project.

The workshop will be held in Lucca, Italy on 20 - 24 June 2011.

Please visit http://cnd.iit.cnr.it/aoc2011/ for further details and registration.

Future of Social Networking Workshop

Posted: 10 Feb 2011

SOCIALNETS has organised a one day workshop on the Future of Social Networking with experts from Industry and Academia. The event took place in The Møller Centre, Churchill College in University fo Cambridge on November 18th 2010.

Slides and videos from the workshop are now online, and can be found at: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/socialnets/program.html

Robin Dunbar's interview

Posted: 8 October 2010

During the second week of October 2010 gave a live interview for the Spanish-speaking world programme "Los Originales" on La X-Mas Musica radio station, Bogota, Colombia, hosted by Jaime Sanchexz Cristo. Apparently, this is the most popular radio programme in south America (other guests have included Bill Clinton, David Bowie, Beyonce....).

Robin Dunbar's also gave an interview for the popular radio programme BBC 5-Live.

SESOC 2011: 3rd IEEE International Workshop on SECurity and SOCial Networking

Posted: 20 July 2010

Socialnets Consortium members, Thorsten Strufe and Melek Önen are co-chairing the 3rd IEEE International Workshop on SECurity and SOCial Networking (SESOC 2011 - www.sesoc.org). The workshop will take place on 21st March 2011 in Seattle, USA. David Molnar from Microsoft Research is invited to give a keynote speech.

Last year, SESOC 2010 workshop (www.sesoc.org/sesoc2010) invited Ryan McGeehan, Manager of Security Incident Response from Facebook Incorporation. Mr McGeehan gave a keynote speach, "Threats to the Social Web".

ECCS'10 - Satellite Meeting on Science of Complex Networks

Posted: 15 July 2010

A number of Socialnets Consortium members have been confirmed as invited speakers at the Satellite Meeting on Science of Complex Networks (scnet 2010) at the ECCS’10 European Conference on Complex Systems that will be held at the Lisbon University Institute, betwen 13th and 17th September, 2010. The satellite meeting aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners working on areas related to complex networks.

Further information about the satellite meeting can be found at the meeting's website: http://www2.fis.ua.pt/scn2010/scn.htm.

List of invited speakers: http://eccs2010.eu/invitedspeakers.

Main conference website: http://eccs2010.eu/.

Safebook in the media

Posted: 15 July 2010

Thorsten Strufe, Professor in Tu-Darmstadt, who was previously involved in Socialnets and Safebook design together with current Socilanets members, Antonio Cutillo and Refik Molva (both of EURECOM), gave interviews to German newpapers:
Echo online: "Safebook" - Darmstädter Professor plant sicheres soziales Netzwerk
Faz.net: Safebook - Das Private soll wieder privat werden

Prof. Refik Molva also gave a number of lectures and talks to present Safebook at different universities or research labs, including ETH Zurich, EPFL in Lausanne, Summer school in Sophia-Antipolis, and INSA Lyon.

Prof Robin Dunbar's book "How Many Friends Does One Need" published

Posted: 12 July 2010

Professor Robin Dunbar's book "How Many Friends Does One Person Need?" (ISBN:9780571253425, Faber and Faber, 2010) was published by Faber in February this year, with translations currently being produced in Polish, Turkish, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. He has given talks related to the book at a number of literary and science festivals, including the Royal Society of Arts (London), Cheltenham Science Festival, the Bath, Swindon, and Edinburgh Book Festivals, and the Ways-with-Words Festivals in Cumbria and Dartington.

Prof Robin Dunbar at the Nobel Symposium on the "Enlightened Brain", and other lectures

Posted: 1 July 2010

Prof. Robin Dunbar, who heads The Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University and is a member of the SOCIALNETS Consortium, has given invited lectures on his work on social networks at the Nobel Symposium on the "Enlightened Brain" to celebrate the bicentenary of the foundation of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and the Netherlands Royal Academy of Science's Darwin 200 meeting in Amsterdam. He has given keynote lectures to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Centre for the Philosophy of the Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research conference on "Evolution and Behaviour" in Amsterdam, the 10th anniversary meeting of the Psychology Postgraduate Affairs Group and the Radboud University Nijmegen Graduate School for Social Sciences. He has also given lectures at a conference on "Operational Adaptation" organised by the US Office of Naval Research in Edinburgh, the "Think Digital: Understanding Social Media's Impact on Healthcare" conference in London and the "Religion, Tolerance and Intolerance" conference, Oxford.

Prof Robin Dunbar on friends, social groups, social networks and more - in the media

Posted: 21 June 2010

Robin Dunbar gave a number of interviews to various TV, radio and newspapers in Britain, USA, Ireland and Italy on the similarity of social group sizes constraints in real life and online social networking sites. In particular, Robin Dunbar took part in the BBC "Virtual Revolution: Homo Interneticus?" programme, where he talked about the Dunbar Number, the upper limit to the number of social bonds we can ever have in our lives, and how it relates to the online social networks. An audio extract from this programme can befound here. He also talked to the Guardian about the Evolutionary Anthropology and limitations of Facebook in his interview entitled "My Bright Idea: Robin Dunbar"; and about why humans need friends and what the optimum number of friends is - in his interview to the Guardian's Science Weekly: Can you have too many friends?

Key opportunities for new social networking technology

The SOCIALNETS project has been investigating ways in which this new paradigm can be exploited. Three key opportunities for new social networking technology have been identified:
- Social Micro-Blogging (pdf) (*access to this paper is currently restricted to authorised users only)
- Social Network Services in Developing Regions (pdf)
- Opportunistic Computing (pdf)(*access to this paper is currently restricted to authorised users only)

Social Micro-Blogging:
In recent years, the concept of blogging has received increasing public interest, and more recently this has been followed by micro-blogging by websites such as Twitter. This web-based phenomenon allows users to send extremely short updates via the Internet, which can be followed by a public audience.

Micro-blogs are an ideal content for devices that communicate directly and locally share content on a casual basis because micro-blogs are low-payload and may have a local or social context that is of more relevance to those in the immediate vicinity. At present, this aspect is only partially incorporated in Internet micro-blogging such as Twitter. Additionally, local social structures and interactions can assist content in reaching recipients, who can derive some additional value from it, which may often happen when users are in a local context with each other. This doesn’t naturally occur when fixed infrastructure is used to provide social micro blogging.

Social Network Services in Developing Regions:
According to the World Internet Statistics, 76.5% of the world’s population still did not have Internet access in year 2008; this figure mostly comprises inhabitants of developing regions. Fortunately, the mobile phone has a much higher penetration rate in these regions, compared to the Internet and fixed telephone lines. Thus, the deployment of Social Network Service (SNS) for developing regions should focus on mobile phones.

However, the cellular networks in these regions are usually very poor and expensive, and remain a disproportionately urban phenomenon due to the lack of coverage in many rural areas. On the other hand, satellite networks have coverage in most rural areas but these are extremely expensive. Because of that, it is unrealistic that applications featuring friend browsing functionality such as Facebook, Myspace or Orkut would become popular there. Learning from others and from our own experience, the types of SNSs suitable to these regions fall under four main headings: friend searching, resource sharing, information seeking, and product marketing. Nevertheless, overall, SNSs can improve standards of living and communication by introducing new services that use existing social links and interactions within the members of the communities.

Opportunistic Computing:
Essentially, opportunistic computing can be described as distributed computing with the caveats of intermittent connectivity and delay tolerance. The major challenge in opportunistic computing is to effectively utilize opportunistic contacts to make information available and accessible and to provide collaborative computing services, to applications and users. In order to make opportunistic computing a reality, middleware services are needed to mask disconnections and delays, manage heterogeneous computing resources, control data and services access and placement, thus providing a uniform view of the system to the applications.

SESOC 2010: 2nd IEEE International Workshop on SECurity and SOCial Networking

Posted: 10 March 2010

Socialnets Consortium members, Thorsten Strufe and Melek Önen are organising the 2nd IEEE International Workshop on SECurity and SOCial Networking (SESOC 2010 - http://www.sesoc.org/sesoc2010), co-chaired by Refik Molva (EURECOM) and Gene Tsudik (University of California Irvine, USA). The workshop will take place on 29th March 2010 in Mannheim, Germany. Ryan McGeehan, Manager of Security Incident Response from Facebook Incorporation, is invited to give a keynote speach entitled "Threats to the Social Web".

WoWMoM Workshop

Posted: 20 Feb 2010

Sponsored by IEEE, IEEE Computer Society
Website: http://cnd.iit.cnr.it/aoc2010/

Call for papers

The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum between the autonomic and opportunistic communication communities to exchange ideas, discuss solutions, and share experiences among researchers, professionals, and application developers both from industry and academia.

The synergies between autonomic and opportunistic communications & social networks studies and technologies are one of the primary interests of this year's edition.

Original papers addressing both theoretical and practical aspects of autonomic and opportunistic communications and are solicited.
Papers describing prototype implementations and deployments are welcome.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
Architecture and models for autonomic and opportunistic communications
Economic, biological and social models used for autonomic and opportunistic communications
Social networking technologies applied to autonomic and opportunistic communications
Tools and techniques for designing, analyzing and building autonomic and
opportunistic networks
Adaptive security for self protection of networks
Mobility models for opportunistic networking
Novel management techniques for autonomic and opportunistic communications
Sensing, monitoring and measurements for self-managing networks
Advanced technologies for enabling autonomic and opportunistic communications
Autonomic and opportunistic communication testbeds and measurements
Algorithmic aspects associated with autonomic communications environments and problems

ASONAM 2010

Posted: 19 Feb 2010

Website: http://www.asonam.com/

The study of of social networks originated in social and business communities. In recent years, social network research has advanced significantly; the development of sophisticated techniques for Social Network Analysis and Mining (SNAM) has been highly influenced by the online social Web sites, email logs, phone logs and instant messaging systems, which are widely analyzed using graph theory and machine learning techniques. People perceive the Web increasingly as a social medium that fosters interaction among people, sharing of experiences and knowledge, group activities, community formation and evolution. This has led to a rising prominence of SNAM in academia, politics, homeland security and business. This follows the pattern of known entities of our society that have evolved into networks in which actors are increasingly dependent on their structural embedding.

The international conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2010) will primarily provide an interdisciplinary venue that will bring together practitioners and researchers from a variety of SNAM fields to promote collaborations and exchange of ideas and practices. ASONAM 2010 is intended to address important aspects with a specific focus on the emerging trends and industry needs associated with social networking analysis and mining. The conference solicits experimental and theoretical works on social network analysis and mining along with their application to real life situations.

MobiOpp 2010

Posted: 08 Feb 2010

Website: http://cnd.iit.cnr.it/mobiopp2010/

Call for papers

Opportunistic Networking is one of the emerging communication paradigms in wireless mobile communications. Opportunistic networks are commonly defined as a type of challenged networks where communication opportunities are based on sporadic and intermittent contacts, disconnections and reconnections may frequently occur, and the assumption on the existence of an end-to-end path between the source and the destination is released. As compared to the legacy MANETs, where an always-connected infrastructure-less network is assumed, opportunistic networks are much closer to real pervasive networking scenarios, where devices (with sensing capabilities) are carried while users move, and can connect and disconnect continuosly relying their communication chances on a store-carry-and-forward approach. The aim of MobiOpp 2010 is to bring together researchers working in this emerging area, thus also providing a reference event for those working on self-organizing wireless mobile networks which usually exploit the opportunistic communication paradigm. In this workshop we aim to explore novel research issues related to all aspects of opportunistic networks. Original contributions are solicited, being related to systems and protocols design, development and analysis, in all areas of Opportunistic Networking.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Novel architectures
Routing protocols
Transport and reliability issues in opportunistic networks
Resource management techniques
Dissemination and replication techniques
Opportunistic networking in P2P systems
Social-aware opportunisitc networking
Middleware services in opportunistic networks
Opportunistic networking applications
Opportunistic networking in wireless sensor networks
Multimodal urban sensing
Security issues in opportunistic networks
Trust and cooperation in opportunistic networks
Mobility models for opportunistic networks
Tools and techniques for designing, analyzing and building opportunistic networks
Opportunistic networks testbeds and measurements
Opportunistic networks performance modeling

The workshop proceedings will be published by ACM. Extended versions of workshop selected papers will be considered for possible fast track publication in the Computer Communications Journal (Elsevier)

Special issue: Pervasive Adaptation: Visions & Challenges in ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems

Posted: 13 Nov 2009

Call for Papers: http://www.perada.eu/calls-for-papers/36-journals-special-issues-book-chapters/85-pervasive-adaptation-visions-challenges

Pervasive Adaptation is concerned with models, tools, and technologies to be used in pervasive information and communication systems that are capable of autonomously adapting to highly dynamic contexts. The successful development of future pervasive systems will increasingly require handling complex interactions between intelligent objects, computers, sensors and actuators, and intelligent objects of any kind. The real challenge is to make such interactions fruitful, purposeful, and secure, despite the constantly changing characteristics of the environment (whether social, physical, or technical) in which such systems will operate, in the absence of any centralized control, and possibly even in the absence of a complete understanding of the structure and micro-level functioning of these systems. Clearly, the only way to approach this is to make systems able to adapt themselves (at the level of individual components or at the collective level) over situations and time, taking into account the overall emergent behavior of the system, and possibly offensively exploit the context dynamics to improve and evolve.

This special issues welcomes submissions on any topic related to pervasive adaptation. Survey/tutorial papers focusing on a specific topic of pervasive adaptation and aimed at framing the key concepts, challenges, and related work on that topic, are particularly welcome. Technical papers describing some original technical contribution are equally welcomed, provided they contain enough introductory/survey material to make the paper of general interest behind its specific technical contribution.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Adaptation and emergence in pervasive computing systems
Evolvability and adaptability in pervasive systems
Nature-inspired and socially-inspired paradigms for adaptable pervasive systems
Enforcing self-* properties in pervasive systems
Models, tools, middleware, and technologies, for pervasive society of artefacts
Innovative interfaces and interaction-models for pervasive adaptation
Adaptive models of trust and security for pervasive systems
Security models for networked societies of artifacts
Social/economical/energetic concerns for pervasive adaptation

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS IS 15 DECEMBER 2009: This special issue welcomes submissions on any topic related to pervasive adaptation.

Survey/tutorial papers focusing on a specific topic of pervasive adaptation aimed at framing key concepts, challenges, and related work
on that topic, are welcomed as well as technical papers, providing they contain sufficient introductory/survey material to make the paper
of general interest. Please see the PerAda website or ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS) for more
information.

AOC 2009 CFP

Posted by: 03 Nov 2008

The Third IEEE WoWMoM Workshop on Autonomic and Opportunistic Communications

Call for papers

The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum between the autonomic and opportunistic communication communities to exchange ideas, discuss solutions, and share experiences among researchers, professionals, and application developers both from industry and academia. The synergies between autonomic and opportunistic communications and social networks studies and technologies are one of the primary interests of this year's edition.
Original papers addressing both theoretical and practical aspects of autonomic and opportunistic communications and are solicited. Papers describing prototype implementations and deployments are welcome.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

Architecture and models for autonomic and opportunistic communications
Economic, biological and social models used for autonomic and opportunistic communications
Social networking technologies applied to autonomic and opportunistic communications
Tools and techniques for designing, analyzing and building autonomic and opportunistic networks
Adaptive security for self protection of networks
Mobility models for opportunistic networking
Novel management techniques for autonomic and opportunistic communications
Sensing, monitoring and measurements for self-managing networks
Advanced technologies for enabling autonomic and opportunistic communications
Autonomic and opportunistic communication testbeds and measurements
Algorithmic aspects associated with autonomic communications environments and problems

WONS 2009 CFP

Posted: 03 Oct 2008

Social Networking session at WONS 09
Organizers: J. Crowcroft (U. Cambridge), I. Stavrakakis (U. Athens)

February 2-4, 2009. Snowbird, Utah, USA
Web Site: wons09.cs.ucla.edu

This session solicits original, previously unpublished ideas on completed work, position papers, and/or work-in-progress papers. We encourage papers that propose new research directions or could generate lively debate at the workshop.

Aspects of social networking are to be considered that affect the design of Wireless On-demand Network Systems and Services (WONS), providing novel insights on protocol and network design, modeling and performance evaluation, pricing and profitability models, QoS models, practical implementations, service level aspects and Internet integration of wireless networks.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

- Design for "On demand" wireless mobile social networks
- Content dissemination and discovery strategies in wireless-mobile social networks
- Information sharing and forwarding in wireless-mobile social DTNs.
- Rating, reputation, trust and interest-specification and evolution in wireless mobile social networks
- Challenges and opportunities posed by mobile social networks

Dates:

Paper submission: Monday, Nov 10, 2008 (NO EXTENSION!)
Acceptance notification: Thursday, Nov 20, 2008
Camera-ready: Dec 7, 2008
Workshop date: Feb 2-4, 2009

Submission Instructions:

Submitted papers must not have been published elsewhere or currently be under review by another conference or journal. Authors are invited to submit double-column full (8 pages) and short papers (4 pages) in PDF format having a font size no smaller than 10pt. Short papers should present future research directions, ongoing work, visionary, innovative ideas; accepted short papers will populate poster sessions at the conference and will be included in the conference proceedings. Submission implies the willingness of at least one of the authors to register and present the paper. Conference proceedings will be included in the IEEE Xplore library.

SOSOC 2008

Posted: 26 Sep 2008

Eurecom successfully organised a Workshop on Security in Opportunistic and SOCial Networks.

SASO 2008

Posted: 26 Sep 2008

Socialnets will be presenting two papers in October at the Workshop on Pervasive Adaptation (PERADA) at SASO 2008.

 

Perada

Socialnets is a 7th Framework Programme project funded under the FET pervasive adaptation initiative.
Contact project coordinator: Roger Whitaker

Fp7