Spambot detection in online social networks is a long-lasting challenge involving the study and design of detection techniques capable of efficiently identifying ever-evolving spammers. Recently, a new wave of social spambots has emerged, with advanced human-like characteristics that allow them to go undetected even by current state-of-the-art algorithms. In this paper, we show that efficient spambots detection can be achieved via an in-depth analysis of their collective behaviors exploiting the digital DNA technique for modeling the behaviors of social network users. Inspired by its biological counterpart, in the digital DNA representation the behavioral lifetime of a digital account is encoded in a sequence of characters. Then, we define a similarity measure for such digital DNA sequences. We build upon digital DNA and the similarity between groups of users to characterize both genuine accounts and spambots. Leveraging such a characterization, we design the Social Fingerprinting technique, which is able to discriminate among spambots and genuine accounts in both a supervised and an unsupervised fashion. We also evaluate the effectiveness of Social Fingerprinting and we compare it with three state-of-the-art detection showing the superiority of our solution. Finally, among the peculiarities of our approach is the possibility to apply off-the-shelf DNA analysis techniques to study online users behaviors and to efficiently rely on a limited number of lightweight account characteristics.
Inspired by particle physics, fluids mechanics, and astronomy, the authors of @cite_35 consider group anomalies in a wider flavor, not necessarily oriented to groups of spambots. As an example, focusing on the major conferences in the area of artificial intelligence, they consider if there are published papers whose topics are anomalous for those conferences, leveraging features inherent to both the single component (e.g., the topic of the paper) and the relationships among components (e.g., authors common to different papers).
@cite_35
2109154616 1957718552 1686337294 2249121382
We propose a new unsupervised learning technique for extracting information from large text collections. We model documents as if they were generated by a two-stage stochastic process. Each author is represented by a probability distribution over topics, and each topic is represented as a probability distribution over words for that topic. The words in a multi-author paper are assumed to be the result of a mixture of each authors' topic mixture. The topic-word and author-topic distributions are learned from data in an unsupervised manner using a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. We apply the methodology to a large corpus of 160,000 abstracts and 85,000 authors from the well-known CiteSeer digital library, and learn a model with 300 topics. We discuss in detail the interpretation of the results discovered by the system including specific topic and author models, ranking of authors by topic and topics by author, significant trends in the computer science literature between 1990 and 2002, parsing of abstracts by topics and authors and detection of unusual papers by specific authors. An online query interface to the model is also discussed that allows interactive exploration of author-topic models for corpora such as CiteSeer. This paper presents a hierarchical framework for detecting local and global anomalies via hierarchical feature representation and Gaussian process regression. While local anomaly is typically detected as a 3D pattern matching problem, we are more interested in global anomaly that involves multiple normal events interacting in an unusual manner such as car accident. To simultaneously detect local and global anomalies, we formulate the extraction of normal interactions from training video as the problem of efficiently finding the frequent geometric relations of the nearby sparse spatio-temporal interest points. A codebook of interaction templates is then constructed and modeled using Gaussian process regression. A novel inference method for computing the likelihood of an observed interaction is also proposed. As such, our model is robust to slight topological deformations and can handle the noise and data unbalance problems in the training data. Simulations show that our system outperforms the main state-of-the-art methods on this topic and achieves at least 80 detection rates based on three challenging datasets. When a mixture of particles with different attributes undergoes vibration, a segregation pattern is often observed. For example, in muesli cereal packs, the largest particles---the Brazil nuts---tend to end up at the top. For this reason, the phenomenon is known as the Brazil nut effect. In previous research, an algorithm inspired by this effect was designed to produce segregation patterns in swarms of simulated agents that move on a horizontal plane. In this paper, we adapt this algorithm for implementation on robots with directional vision. We use the e-puck robot as a platform to test our implementation. In a swarm of e-pucks, different robots mimic disks of different sizes (larger than their physical dimensions). The motion of every robot is governed by a combination of three components: (i) attraction towards a point, which emulates the effect of a gravitational pull, (ii) random motion, which emulates the effect of vibration, and (iii) repulsion from nearby robots, which emulates the effect of collisions between disks. The algorithm does not require robots to discriminate between other robots; yet, it is capable of forming annular structures where the robots in each annulus represent disks of identical size. We report on a set of experiments performed with a group of 20 physical e-pucks. The results obtained in 100 trials of 20 minutes each show that the percentage of incorrectly-ordered pairs of disks from different groups decreases as the size ratio of disks in different groups is increased. In our experiments, this percentage was, on average, below 0.5 for size ratios from 3.0 to 5.0. Moreover, for these size ratios, all segregation errors observed were due to mechanical failures that caused robots to stop moving. We introduce autonomous gossiping (A G), a new genre epidemic algorithm for selective dissemination of information in contrast to previous usage of epidemic algorithms which flood the whole network. A G is a paradigm which suits well in a mobile ad-hoc networking (MANET) environment because it does not require any infrastructure or middleware like multicast tree and (un)subscription maintenance for publish subscribe, but uses ecological and economic principles in a self-organizing manner in order to achieve any arbitrary selectivity (flexible casting). The trade-off of using a stateless self-organizing mechanism like A G is that it does not guarantee completeness deterministically as is one of the original objectives of alternate selective dissemination schemes like publish subscribe. We argue that such incompleteness is not a problem in many non-critical real-life civilian application scenarios and realistic node mobility patterns, where the overhead of infrastructure maintenance may outweigh the benefits of completeness, more over, at present there exists no mechanism to realize publish subscribe or other paradigms for selective dissemination in MANET environments.