Section: Research Program

Online Social Networks (OSN)

Large-scale online social networks such as Twitter or FaceBook provide a powerful means of selecting information. They rely on “social filtering”, whereby pieces of information are collectively evaluated and sorted by users. This gives rise to information cascades when one item reaches a large population after spreading much like an epidemics from user to user in a viral manner. Nevertheless, such OSNs expose their users to a large amount of content of no interest to them, a sign of poor “precision” according to the terminology of information retrieval. At the same time, many more relevant content items never reach those users most interested in them. In other words, OSNs also suffer from poor “recall” performance.

This leads to a first challenge: what determines the optimal trade-off between precision and recall in OSNs? And what mechanisms should be deployed in order to approach such an optimal trade-off? We intend to study this question at a theoretical level, by elaborating models and analyses of social filtering, and to validate the resulting hypotheses and designs through experimentation and processing of data traces. More specifically, we envision to reach this general objective by solving the following problems.

Community Detection

Identification of implicit communities of like-minded users and contact recommendation for helping users “rewire” the information network for better performance. Potential schemes may include variants of spectral clustering and belief propagation-style message passing. Limitations / relative merits of candidate schemes, their robustness to noise in the input data, will be investigated.

Incentivization

Design of incentive mechanisms to limit the impact of users' selfishness on system behavior: efficiency should be maintained even when users are gaming the system to try and increase their estimated expertise. By offering rewards to users on the basis of their involvement in filtering and propagation of content, one might encourage them to adjust their action and contribute to increase the overall efficiency of the OSN as a content access platform.

One promising direction will be to leverage the general class of Vickrey-Clarke-Groves incentive-compatible mechanisms of economic theory to design so-called marginal utility reward mechanisms for OSN users.

Social Recommendation and Privacy

So far we have only alluded to the potential benefits of OSNs in terms of better information access. We now turn to the risks they create. Privacy breaches constitute the greatest of these risks: OSN users disclose a wealth of personal information and thereby expose themselves to discrimination by potential employers, insurers, lenders, government agencies...Such privacy concerns are not specific to OSNs: internauts' online activity is discretely tracked by companies such as Bluekai, and subsequently monetized to advertisers seeking better ad targeting. While disclosure of personal data creates a privacy risk, on the other hand it fuels personalized services and thereby potentially benefits everyone.

One line of research will be to focus on the specific application scenario of content categorization, and to characterize analytically the trade-off between user privacy protection (captured by differential privacy), accuracy of content categorization, and sample complexity (measured in number of probed users).