Ming-Hung Wang

Boosting election prediction accuracy by crowd wisdom on social forums

Recent years, with the rapid development of the online social services, people are able to publish and share their opinions, activities, and feelings of their everyday lives as well as public issues on the Internet. By the increasingly large amount of data among online social services, researchers explore approaches to understand how human beings demonstrate their political tendency from the data. In this paper, we focus on boosting election prediction accuracy by leveraging the power of crowd wisdom among social media. In addition to previous proposed approaches, we conduct Chinese sentiment analysis and use peer-to-peer rating records among the social network to establish a better prediction model. To verify our proposal, we validate our methodology by the 2014 Taiwanese local elections. We use the data collected from the largest forum in Taiwan during the last three months election campaign. From the results, our proposal outperforms previous approaches in predicting the final vote winners of the elections as well as the final vote shares.

Modelling Polarity of Articles and Identifying Influential Authors through Social Movements

Sunflower Movement is one of the most influential social movements in Taiwan over the past few decades. In order to protest the review process at the legislature, the protesters entered and occupied the building of the Legislative Yuan (the parliament) of Taiwan on March 18, 2014, without any sign in advance. This action shook the government and caught a high level of attention in Taiwan. People discussed the action from different viewpoints and showed their supporting and opposition on the movement in daily life as well as on social media sites. However, the information is in chaos since a large number of articles had been published during the movement. In order to realize the social discussions in a comprehensive way, major issues such as extracting notable threads and finding important authors among social sites need to be addressed. In this paper, we provide methodologies to quantify and predict the polarity of each article, we also present a consensus-based approach to identify influential authors on the social forum. From our results, our proposal is effective and efficient for identifying information and authors that are worthy of attention through the social movement.

Automatic Test Pattern Generator for Fuzzing Based on Finite State Machine

With the rapid development of the Internet, several emerging technologies are adopted to construct fancy, interactive, and user-friendly websites. Among these technologies, HTML5 is a popular one and is widely used in establishing modern sites. However, the security issues in the new web technologies are also raised and are worthy of investigation. For vulnerability investigation, many previous studies used fuzzing and focused on generation-based approaches to produce test cases for fuzzing; however, these methods require a significant amount of knowledge and mental efforts to develop test patterns for generating test cases. To decrease the entry barrier of conducting fuzzing, in this study, we propose a test pattern generation algorithm based on the concept of finite state machines. We apply graph analysis techniques to extract paths from finite state machines and use these paths to construct test patterns automatically. According to the proposal, fuzzing can be completed through inputting a regular expression corresponding to the test target. To evaluate the performance of our proposal, we conduct an experiment in identifying vulnerabilities of the input attributes in HTML5. According to the results, our approach is not only efficient but also effective for identifying weak validators in HTML5.

SDUDP: A Reliable UDP-Based Transmission Protocol Over SDN

The recent rapid development of Web technology, multimedia content, and interactive data has considerably expanded the size of the Internet transmissions. Benefiting from the paradigm-shifting technology of software defined networking (SDN), the administrators are now able to easily manage network flows by customizing flow rules over SDN. Inspired by this, we propose a UDP-based reliable transmission framework to improve efficiency of transmission control protocol (TCP) transmission on an SDN-enabled network. The main idea of our framework is to convert the TCP transmission into UDP packets to decrease the overhead during communications, such as handshaking, acknowledgment, and header overhead while using TCP. To guarantee reliability, we have leveraged the power of SDN to designate packets under our protocol to flow in predefined routes and monitor them to avoid possible packet loss. Our proposal is composed of a series of designs and implementations, including the packet format transformations, packet buffering, and retransmission mechanisms on switches. For users, this means that they are transmitting data with TCP, while the overhead of the TCP traffic is reduced significantly through a reliable and lightweight UDP transmission mechanism on the SDN-enabled network. Our evaluation results show that our framework provides a more efficient bandwidth usage and guarantees the reliability of packets as in TCP transmissions.

SDN storage: A stream-based storage system over software-defined networks

Software-defined networking (SDN) is well-known of its programmable and centralized management mechanism of networks. The controller unit in SDN enables users to determine network behaviors by defining flow rules on programmable switches in SDN. In this paper, we briefly propose a novel concept of network storage systems. Unlike most network storage systems store files on hosts and access files through networks, we leverage the programmable ability of SDN to assemble switching fabric queues as a storage system. Users upload files and our system keeps the files as packets alive by looping them in our defined routes. Every time users want to retrieve their files, our system duplicates the desired packets and redirects them to users.

SDN Migration: An Efficient Approach to Integrate OpenFlow Networks with STP-Enabled Networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a paradigm shift technology in networking. However, it is not practical to remove existing networks for building SDN networks or to replace all operating network devices with SDN-enabled devices. Therefore, SDN migration, which implies co-existing techniques and gradually moving to SDN, is an important issue. In this paper, we focus on how to integrate SDN networks with legacy networks which run Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). Our approach has three advantages. First, our approach does not require an SDN controller to apply the STP exchange APP on all switches but only on boundary switches. Second, our approach enables legacy networks to concurrently use multiple links that used to be blocked except one for avoiding loops. Third, our approach decreases BPDU frames used in STP construction and topology change.

SDNort: A Software Defined Network Testing Framework Using Openflow

Network performance evaluation tools play important roles in network researches. However, most tools will cause highly CPU utilization and high monetary cost. Moreover, it is not easy to set up a test environment anytime and anywhere. To solve this problem, we build a lightweight network performance evaluation tool, SDNort, through the OpenFlow architecture. Through our evaluation tool, users can generate high throughput traffic to testing targets and collect related statistics via OpenFlow commands. Furthermore, users can easily customize testing packets for application evaluation. Finally, we virtualize our work as a VNF (Virtual Network Function) and deployed to a cloud system.

Privacy Crisis Due to Crisis Response on the Web

In recent disasters, the web has served as a medium of communication among disaster response teams, survivors, local citizens, curious onlookers, and zealous people who are willing to assist victims affected by disasters. To encourage and speed up information dissemination, the availability and convenience of use are normally the top concerns in designing disaster response web services, where a design of free-formed inputs without access control is commonly adopted. However, such design may result in personal information disclosure and privacy leakage. In this paper, using a case study of a real-life disaster response service, the MKER (Morakot Event Reporting) forum, we show that the disclosure of personal information and the resulting privacy disclosure is indeed a serious problem that is currently happening. In our case, we have successfully mapped 1,438 unique cell phone numbers and 1,383 unique addresses to individuals using an automated method, not to mention the much greater invasion of privacy that could be effected by manual analysis of the messages posted on the forum. To resolve this issue, we propose several means to mitigate and prevent the mentioned privacy leakage on disaster response services from being happened.