Dan Hong

User identification across multiple social networks

Today, more and more people have their virtual identities on the web. It is common that people are users of more than one social network and also their friends may be registered on multiple websites. A facility to aggregate our online friends into a single integrated environment would enable the user to keep up-to-date with their virtual contacts more easily, as well as to provide improved facility to search for people across different websites. In this paper, we propose a method to identify users based on profile matching. We use data from two popular social networks to study the similarity of profile definition. We evaluate the importance of fields in the web profile and develop a profile comparison tool. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our tool in identifying and consolidating duplicated users on different websites.

Ubiquitous enterprise service adaptations based on contextual user behavior

Recent advances in mobile technologies and infrastructures have created the demand for ubiquitous access to enterprise services from mobile handheld devices. Further, with the invention of new interaction devices, the context in which the services are being used becomes an integral part of the activity carried out with the system. Traditional human–computer interface (HCI) theories are now inadequate for developing these context-aware applications, as we believe that the notion of context should be extended to different categories: computing contexts, user contexts, and physical contexts for ubiquitous computing. This demands a new paradigm for system requirements elicitation and design in order to make good use of such extended context information captured from mobile user behavior. Instead of redesigning or adapting existing enterprise services in an ad hoc manner, we introduce a methodology for the elicitation of context-aware adaptation requirements and the matching of context-awareness features to the target context by capability matching. For the implementation of such adaptations, we propose the use of three tiers of views: user interface views, data views, and process views. This approach centers on a novel notion of process views to ubiquitous service adaptation, where mobile users may execute a more concise version or modified procedure of the original process according to their behavior under different contexts. The process view also serves as the key mechanism for integrating user interface views and data views. Based on this model, we analyze the design and implementation issues of some common ubiquitous access situations and show how to adapt them systematically into a context-aware application by considering the requirements of a ubiquitous enterprise information system.

Setting Access Permission through Transitive Relationship in Web-based Social Networks

The rising popularity of various social networking websites has created a huge problem on Internet privacy. Although it is easy to post photos, comments, opinions on some events, etc. on the Web, some of these data (such as a person’s location at a particular time, criticisms of a politician, etc.) are private and should not be accessed by unauthorized users. Although social networks facilitate sharing, the fear of sending sensitive data to a third party without knowledge or permission of the data owners discourages people from taking full advantage of some social networking applications. We exploit the existing relationships on social networks and build a ‘‘trust network’’ with transitive relationship to allow controlled data sharing so that the privacy and preferences of data owners are respected. The trust network linking private data owners, private data requesters, and intermediary users is a directed weighted graph. The permission value for each private data requester can be automatically assigned in this network based on the transitive relationship. Experiments were conducted to confirm the feasibility of constructing the trust network from existing social networks, and to assess the validity of permission value assignments in the query process. Since the data owners only need to define the access rights of their closest contacts once, this privacy scheme can make private data sharing easily manageable by social network participants.

Towards Ubiquitous Government Services through Adaptations with Context and Views in a Three-Tier Architecture

With the recent advances in mobile technologies and infrastructures, citizens start to demand for not just mobile but also ubiquitous access to e-government services. Further with the invention of new interaction devices, the context in which the service is being used becomes an integral part of the activity carried out with the system. This demands a new paradigm for system requirements elicitation and design in order to make good use of such extended context information. Instead of redesigning or adapting existing e-government services in an ad-hoc manner, we introduce a methodology for the elicitation of context-aware adaptation requirements and the matching of context-awareness features to the target context by capability matching. For the implementation of these adaptations, we propose the use of three tiers of views: user interface views, data views, and process views. This approach centers on a novel notion of process views to ubiquitous government (u-government) service adaptation, where mobile users may execute a more concise version or modified procedures of the original process according to their context. The process view also serves as the key mechanism for integrating user interface views and data views. We demonstrate our methodology by extending an e-government appointment service into a mobile one with context support

Adapting Ubiquitous Enterprise Services with Context and Views

Recent advances in mobile technologies and infrastructures have led to increasing demands for ubiquitous access to enterprise services from mobile handheld devices, such as mobile phones and PDAs. The context in which such a service is used becomes an integral part of the associated enterprise application. This demands a new paradigm for system requirements elicitation and design in order to make good use of such extended context information. Instead of redesigning or adapting existing enterprise services in an ad-hoc manner, we introduce a methodology for the elicitation of context-aware adaptation requirements and the matching of context-awareness features to the target context by capability matching. For the implementation of these adaptations, we propose the use of three tiers of views: user interface views, data views, and process views. This approach centers on a novel notion of process views to service adaptation according to their context. We demonstrate our methodology by extending an enterprise appointment service into a ubiquitous one with context support