Vincent Y. Shen

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.

VoIP Aggregation in Wireless Backhaul Networks

The newly emerging wireless backhaul network has fundamental difficulties in supporting Voice over IP (VoIP) applications due to the MAC overheads introduced by huge amounts of small packets. Packet aggregation is a promising approach to mitigate these overheads. However, previous approaches to such problems are often stringent, not adaptive to the change of channel conditions. They are operated by each TAP (Transit Access Point) separately without any coordination in the use of shared channels. As a result, they fail to ensure the VoIP quality in terms of delay and loss. The major contribution of this paper is the proposal of a coordinated aggregation algorithm, which is adaptive and distributed. By coordinating with neighboring TAPs, the proposed algorithm is able to assign an appropriate aggregation rate to each TAP, aiming at better channel utilization and lower packet loss and delay. We evaluate this design by comprehensive analysis and simulations. The simulation results show that our algorithm significantly improves the VoIP capacity in wireless backhaul networks and outperforms existing aggregation algorithms.

ACM China Council

in China, to raise ACM’s visibility throughout China, and to contribute to advancing computing as a science and profession in China. In the process, we work to increase ACM membership in China. We can report significant progress in these areas since our 2010 launch. Indeed, before the existence of the ACM China Council, most, if not all, Chinese professionals thought ACM was an American organization. In addition, Chinese membership in ACM was low—less than 1,500 total. The first two major tasks for ACM China were educating the computing community about ACM—what it is and what it offers—and recruiting more members in China. Early on, ACM China initiated conversations with the China Computer Federation (CCF). With more than 15,000 members, CCF has a dominant position among computer professionals and students in China and is very much like ACM in terms of its mission and focus on publications, conferences, and chapters. The discussions between ACM China and Zide Du, the General Secretary of CCF, and other officials in CCF were quite productive, partly because many of the members-at-large of ACM China are also senior members of CCF. During CCF’s 2010 China National Computer Conference (CNCC) at Hang Zhou, Zhejiang, China, ACM President Alain Chesnais delivered a keynote speech to 1,500 attendees, introducing ACM, its activities worldwide, and the nature of volunteer work within the Association. His talk was well received. ACM CEO John White and CCF’s Zide Du then signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the two organizations. This MOU established a special 12-month joint membership in ACM for CCF members. In addition, CCF’s monthly flagship publication, Communications of the CCF, gave ACM two pages per issue to publicize the Association’s activities and initiatives. The MOU also called for ACM and CCF to explore joint efforts in publications, conferences, chapters, and awards. One joint activity has focused on CCF’s Young Computer Scientists & Engineers Forum (YOCSEF)—an annual series of academic activities hosted by more than 20 cities. Since early 2011, ACM China has worked with CCF to organize several YOCSEF events where Yunhao Liu (vice chair of ACM China Council) and other ACM China Council members delivered talks to help YOCSEF members learn more about ACM and the ways they can get involved in the Association’s activities. As a result of these efforts, five YOCSEF chapters (in Shanghai, Beijing, Jinan, Chengdu, and Hangzhou) will become CCF-ACM chapters this year. ACM China also invited senior computer scientists to join the CCF@U program, which is similar to ACM’s Distinguished Speakers Program. The ACM China contribution to the CCF@U program involves talks to university students to help them develop in their professional careers. This activity also provides another opportunity for students to find out more about ACM. Speakers from this program visited more than 90 universities last year. ACM co-sponsored CNCC 2011, held at Shenzhen, Guangdong Province last November. ACM Turing Award winner, Joseph Sifakis, and ACM’s past president, Dame Wendy Hall, delivered keynote talks; Yunhao Liu addressed the opening ceremony. More than 2,000 computing academics, students, and professionals attended this event. At that conference, the CCF Executive Committee voted to continue the joint-membership arrangement with ACM by increasing the cost of CCF membership to include ACM membership. In late February of this year, more than 10,000 CCF members formally joined ACM. We believe ACM China has reached the original goals set during its first meeting in 2010. In the next two years, we expect to have 10–20 chapters in China and 15,000 members. We plan to organize more activities, especially to improve communications and outreach in both academic institutions and industry. We also plan to sponsor some joint awards with CCF and to begin translating selected articles from Communications of the ACM into Chinese for distribution to members in China.

Task-Specific Utility Assessment Models and their Role in the Development of Software Engineering Handbooks

We argue that research in software engineering metrics and measurement has reached a plateau of sorts, and that the time is right to prepare for an undertaking that could greatly benefit the software producing community; the development of software engineering handbooks. The role of engineering handbooks is described, as are two of the ways they might be used: facilitating reuse, and aiding in the identification of tools, methods, and techniques well suited to particular development tasks. Towards this goal, we propose a cooperative undertaking aimed at creating what we call Software Engineering Utility Assessment Models. These would serve to specify sets of related software engineering tasks and their associated attributes in order to allow for both the categorization and comparison of new and existing tools, methods, and techniques. Some initial thoughts regarding the steps to be employed in their development are illustrated by way of a simple example.