arXiv subjects

David Garcia

Publications and source records attributed to David Garcia.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2015

It's a Man's Wikipedia? Assessing Gender Inequality in an Online Encyclopedia

Wikipedia is a community-created encyclopedia that contains information about notable people from different countries, epochs and disciplines and aims to document the world's knowledge from a neutral point of view. However, the narrow diversity of the Wikipedia editor community has the potential to introduce systemic biases such as gender biases into the content of Wikipedia. In this paper we aim to tackle a sub problem of this larger challenge by presenting and applying a computational method for assessing gender bias on Wikipedia along multiple dimensions. We find that while women on Wikipedia are covered and featured well in many Wikipedia language editions, the way women are portrayed starkly differs from the way men are portrayed. We hope our work contributes to increasing awareness about gender biases online, and in particular to raising attention to the different levels in which gender biases can manifest themselves on the web.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2014

Online Privacy as a Collective Phenomenon

The problem of online privacy is often reduced to individual decisions to hide or reveal personal information in online social networks (OSNs). However, with the increasing use of OSNs, it becomes more important to understand the role of the social network in disclosing personal information that a user has not revealed voluntarily: How much of our private information do our friends disclose about us, and how much of our privacy is lost simply because of online social interaction? Without strong technical effort, an OSN may be able to exploit the assortativity of human private features, this way constructing shadow profiles with information that users chose not to share. Furthermore, because many users share their phone and email contact lists, this allows an OSN to create full shadow profiles for people who do not even have an account for this OSN. We empirically test the feasibility of constructing shadow profiles of sexual orientation for users and non-users, using data from more than 3 Million accounts of a single OSN. We quantify a lower bound for the predictive power derived from the social network of a user, to demonstrate how the predictability of sexual orientation increases with the size of this network and the tendency to share personal information. This allows us to define a privacy leak factor that links individual privacy loss with the decision of other individuals to disclose information. Our statistical analysis reveals that some individuals are at a higher risk of privacy loss, as prediction accuracy increases for users with a larger and more homogeneous first- and second-order neighborhood of their social network. While we do not provide evidence that shadow profiles exist at all, our results show that disclosing of private information is not restricted to an individual choice, but becomes a collective decision that has implications for policy and privacy regulation.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2014

The digital traces of bubbles: feedback cycles between socio-economic signals in the Bitcoin economy

What is the role of social interactions in the creation of price bubbles? Answering this question requires obtaining collective behavioural traces generated by the activity of a large number of actors. Digital currencies offer a unique possibility to measure socio-economic signals from such digital traces. Here, we focus on Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency. Bitcoin has experienced periods of rapid increase in exchange rates (price) followed by sharp decline; we hypothesise that these fluctuations are largely driven by the interplay between different social phenomena. We thus quantify four socio-economic signals about Bitcoin from large data sets: price on on-line exchanges, volume of word-of-mouth communication in on-line social media, volume of information search, and user base growth. By using vector autoregression, we identify two positive feedback loops that lead to price bubbles in the absence of exogenous stimuli: one driven by word of mouth, and the other by new Bitcoin adopters. We also observe that spikes in information search, presumably linked to external events, precede drastic price declines. Understanding the interplay between the socio-economic signals we measured can lead to applications beyond cryptocurrencies to other phenomena which leave digital footprints, such as on-line social network usage.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2014

Gender Asymmetries in Reality and Fiction: The Bechdel Test of Social Media

The subjective nature of gender inequality motivates the analysis and comparison of data from real and fictional human interaction. We present a computational extension of the Bechdel test: A popular tool to assess if a movie contains a male gender bias, by looking for two female characters who discuss about something besides a man. We provide the tools to quantify Bechdel scores for both genders, and we measure them in movie scripts and large datasets of dialogues between users of MySpace and Twitter. Comparing movies and users of social media, we find that movies and Twitter conversations have a consistent male bias, which does not appear when analyzing MySpace. Furthermore, the narrative of Twitter is closer to the movies that do not pass the Bechdel test than to those that pass it. We link the properties of movies and the users that share trailers of those movies. Our analysis reveals some particularities of movies that pass the Bechdel test: Their trailers are less popular, female users are more likely to share them than male users, and users that share them tend to interact less with male users. Based on our datasets, we define gender independence measurements to analyze the gender biases of a society, as manifested through digital traces of online behavior. Using the profile information of Twitter users, we find larger gender independence for urban users in comparison to rural ones. Additionally, the asymmetry between genders is larger for parents and lower for students. Gender asymmetry varies across US states, increasing with higher average income and latitude. This points to the relation between gender inequality and social, economical, and cultural factors of a society, and how gender roles exist in both fictional narratives and public online dialogues.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2013

Security for Smart Mobile Networks: The NEMESYS Approach

The growing popularity of smart mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets has made them an attractive target for cyber-criminals, resulting in a rapidly growing and evolving mobile threat as attackers experiment with new business models by targeting mobile users. With the emergence of the first large-scale mobile botnets, the core network has also become vulnerable to distributed denial-of-service attacks such as the signaling attack. Furthermore, complementary access methods such as Wi-Fi and femtocells introduce additional vulnerabilities for the mobile users as well as the core network. In this paper, we present the NEMESYS approach to smart mobile network security. The goal of the NEMESYS project is to develop novel security technologies for seamless service provisioning in the smart mobile ecosystem, and to improve mobile network security through a better understanding of the threat landscape. To this purpose, NEMESYS will collect and analyze information about the nature of cyber-attacks targeting smart mobile devices and the core network so that appropriate counter-measures can be taken. We are developing a data collection infrastructure that incorporates virtualized mobile honeypots and honeyclients in order to gather, detect and provide early warning of mobile attacks and understand the modus operandi of cyber-criminals that target mobile devices. By correlating the extracted information with known attack patterns from wireline networks, we plan to reveal and identify the possible shift in the way that cyber-criminals launch attacks against smart mobile devices.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2013

The Role of Emotions in Contributors Activity: A Case Study on the GENTOO Community

We analyse the relation between the emotions and the activity of contributors in the Open Source Software project Gentoo. Our case study builds on extensive data sets from the project's bug tracking platform Bugzilla, to quantify the activity of contributors, and its mail archives, to quantify the emotions of contributors by means of sentiment analysis. The Gentoo project is known for a period of centralization within its bug triaging community. This was followed by considerable changes in community organization and performance after the sudden retirement of the central contributor. We analyse how this event correlates with the negative emotions, both in bilateral email discussions with the central contributor, and at the level of the whole community of contributors. We then extend our study to consider the activity patterns on Gentoo contributors in general. We find that contributors are more likely to become inactive when they express strong positive or negative emotions in the bug tracker, or when they deviate from the expected value of emotions in the mailing list. We use these insights to develop a Bayesian classifier that detects the risk of contributors leaving the project. Our analysis opens new perspectives for measuring online contributor motivation by means of sentiment analysis and for real-time predictions of contributor turnover in Open Source Software projects.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2013

NEMESYS: Enhanced Network Security for Seamless Service Provisioning in the Smart Mobile Ecosystem

As a consequence of the growing popularity of smart mobile devices, mobile malware is clearly on the rise, with attackers targeting valuable user information and exploiting vulnerabilities of the mobile ecosystems. With the emergence of large-scale mobile botnets, smartphones can also be used to launch attacks on mobile networks. The NEMESYS project will develop novel security technologies for seamless service provisioning in the smart mobile ecosystem, and improve mobile network security through better understanding of the threat landscape. NEMESYS will gather and analyze information about the nature of cyber-attacks targeting mobile users and the mobile network so that appropriate counter-measures can be taken. We will develop a data collection infrastructure that incorporates virtualized mobile honeypots and a honeyclient, to gather, detect and provide early warning of mobile attacks and better understand the modus operandi of cyber-criminals that target mobile devices. By correlating the extracted information with the known patterns of attacks from wireline networks, we will reveal and identify trends in the way that cyber-criminals launch attacks against mobile devices.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2013

Social Resilience in Online Communities: The Autopsy of Friendster

We empirically analyze five online communities: Friendster, Livejournal, Facebook, Orkut, Myspace, to identify causes for the decline of social networks. We define social resilience as the ability of a community to withstand changes. We do not argue about the cause of such changes, but concentrate on their impact. Changes may cause users to leave, which may trigger further leaves of others who lost connection to their friends. This may lead to cascades of users leaving. A social network is said to be resilient if the size of such cascades can be limited. To quantify resilience, we use the k-core analysis, to identify subsets of the network in which all users have at least k friends. These connections generate benefits (b) for each user, which have to outweigh the costs (c) of being a member of the network. If this difference is not positive, users leave. After all cascades, the remaining network is the k-core of the original network determined by the cost-to-benefit c/b ratio. By analysing the cumulative distribution of k-cores we are able to calculate the number of users remaining in each community. This allows us to infer the impact of the c/b ratio on the resilience of these online communities. We find that the different online communities have different k-core distributions. Consequently, similar changes in the c/b ratio have a different impact on the amount of active users. As a case study, we focus on the evolution of Friendster. We identify time periods when new users entering the network observed an insufficient c/b ratio. This measure can be seen as a precursor of the later collapse of the community. Our analysis can be applied to estimate the impact of changes in the user interface, which may temporarily increase the c/b ratio, thus posing a threat for the community to shrink, or even to collapse.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2012

Agent-based simulations of emotion spreading in online social networks

Quantitative analysis of empirical data from online social networks reveals group dynamics in which emotions are involved (Šuvakov et al). Full understanding of the underlying mechanisms, however, remains a challenging task. Using agent-based computer simulations, in this paper we study dynamics of emotional communications in online social networks. The rules that guide how the agents interact are motivated, and the realistic network structure and some important parameters are inferred from the empirical dataset of \texttt{MySpace} social network. Agent's emotional state is characterized by two variables representing psychological arousal---reactivity to stimuli, and valence---attractiveness or aversiveness, by which common emotions can be defined. Agent's action is triggered by increased arousal. High-resolution dynamics is implemented where each message carrying agent's emotion along the network link is identified and its effect on the recipient agent is considered as continuously aging in time. Our results demonstrate that (i) aggregated group behaviors may arise from individual emotional actions of agents; (ii) collective states characterized by temporal correlations and dominant positive emotions emerge, similar to the empirical system; (iii) nature of the driving signal---rate of user's stepping into online world, has profound effects on building the coherent behaviors, which are observed for users in online social networks. Further, our simulations suggest that spreading patterns differ for the emotions, e.g., "enthusiastic" and "ashamed", which have entirely different emotional content. {\bf {All data used in this study are fully anonymized.}}

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2012

Positive words carry less information than negative words

We show that the frequency of word use is not only determined by the word length \cite{Zipf1935} and the average information content \cite{Piantadosi2011}, but also by its emotional content. We have analyzed three established lexica of affective word usage in English, German, and Spanish, to verify that these lexica have a neutral, unbiased, emotional content. Taking into account the frequency of word usage, we find that words with a positive emotional content are more frequently used. This lends support to Pollyanna hypothesis \cite{Boucher1969} that there should be a positive bias in human expression. We also find that negative words contain more information than positive words, as the informativeness of a word increases uniformly with its valence decrease. Our findings support earlier conjectures about (i) the relation between word frequency and information content, and (ii) the impact of positive emotions on communication and social links.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2012

Emotional persistence in online chatting communities

How do users behave in online chatrooms, where they instantaneously read and write posts? We analyzed about 2.5 million posts covering various topics in Internet relay channels, and found that user activity patterns follow known power-law and stretched exponential distributions, indicating that online chat activity is not different from other forms of communication. Analysing the emotional expressions (positive, negative, neutral) of users, we revealed a remarkable persistence both for individual users and channels. I.e. despite their anonymity, users tend to follow social norms in repeated interactions in online chats, which results in a specific emotional "tone" of the channels. We provide an agent-based model of emotional interaction, which recovers qualitatively both the activity patterns in chatrooms and the emotional persistence of users and channels. While our assumptions about agent's emotional expressions are rooted in psychology, the model allows to test different hypothesis regarding their emotional impact in online communication.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2010

An Agent-Based Model of Collective Emotions in Online Communities

We develop a agent-based framework to model the emergence of collective emotions, which is applied to online communities. Agents individual emotions are described by their valence and arousal. Using the concept of Brownian agents, these variables change according to a stochastic dynamics, which also considers the feedback from online communication. Agents generate emotional information, which is stored and distributed in a field modeling the online medium. This field affects the emotional states of agents in a non-linear manner. We derive conditions for the emergence of collective emotions, observable in a bimodal valence distribution. Dependent on a saturated or a superlinear feedback between the information field and the agent's arousal, we further identify scenarios where collective emotions only appear once or in a repeated manner. The analytical results are illustrated by agent-based computer simulations. Our framework provides testable hypotheses about the emergence of collective emotions, which can be verified by data from online communities.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2002

Prospects for heavy supersymmetric charged Higgs boson searches at hadron colliders

We investigate the production of a heavy charged Higgs boson at hadron colliders within the context of the MSSM. A detailed study is performed for all important production modes and basic background processes for the t\bar{t}b\bar{b} signature. In our analysis we include effects of initial and final state showering, hadronization, and principal detector effects. For the signal production rate we include the leading SUSY quantum effects at high \tanβ>~ mt/mb. Based on the obtained efficiencies for the signal and background we estimate the discovery and exclusion mass limits of the charged Higgs boson at high values of \tanβ. At the upgraded Tevatron the discovery of a heavy charged Higgs boson (MH^+ >~ 200 GeV) is impossible for the tree-level cross-section values. However, if QCD and SUSY effects happen to reinforce mutually, there are indeed regions of the MSSM parameter space which could provide 3σevidence and, at best, 5σcharged Higgs boson discovery at the Tevatron for masses M_H^+<~ 300 GeV and M_H^+<~ 250 GeV, respectively, even assuming squark and gluino masses in the (500-1000) GeV range. On the other hand, at the LHC one can discover a H^+ as heavy as 1 TeV at the canonical confidence level of 5σ; or else exclude its existence at 95% C.L. up to masses ~ 1.5 TeV. Again the presence of SUSY quantum effects can be very important here as they may shift the LHC limits by a few hundred GeV.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2001

Prospects for supersymmetric charged Higgs boson discovery at the Tevatron and the LHC

We investigate the prospects for heavy charged Higgs boson production through the mechanisms pp-bar(pp)->tbH+ +X at the upgraded Fermilab Tevatron and at the upcoming LHC collider at CERN respectively. We focus on the MSSM case at high values of tan[beta]> m_top/m_bot and include the leading SUSY quantum corrections. A detailed study is performed for all important production modes and basic background processes for the "ttbb" signature. At the upgraded Tevatron a charged Higgs signal is potentially viable in the 220-250 GeV range or excluded at 95%CL up to 300 GeV. At the LHC, a H+ of mass up to 800 GeV can be discovered at 5 sigma or else be excluded up to a mass of ~ 1.5 TeV. The presence ofSUSY quantum effects may highly influence the discovery potential in both machines and can typically shift these limits by 200 GeV at the LHC.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2001

Quantum corrections for the MSSM Higgs couplings to SM fermions

Higgs Yukawa couplings to down-type fermions receive, in the MSSM, supersymmetric quantum corrections that can be of order 1 for large values of tanβ, provided μ\sim MSUSY. Therefore, a sensitive prediction for observables driven by any of these couplings can only be obtained after an all-order resummation of the large corrections. We perform this necessary step and show, as an example, the effect of the resummation on the computation of the p\bar{p},pp \to t\bar{b}H^{-} + X cross-section and on the branching ratio BR(b\to sγ) at the next-to-leading order.

hep-ph↗

arXiv1997

Heavy charged Higgs boson decaying into top quark in the MSSM

Observing a heavy charged Higgs boson produced in the near future at the Tevatron or at the LHC would be instant evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model. Whether such a Higgs boson would be supersymmetric or not it could only be decided after accurate prediction of its properties. Here we compute the decay width of the dominant decay of such a boson, namely H^+ -> t \bar{b}, including the leading electroweak corrections originating from large Yukawa couplings within the MSSM. These electroweak effects turn out to be of comparable size to the O(alpha_s) QCD corrections in relevant portions of the MSSM parameter space. Our analysis incorporates the stringent low-energy constraints imposed by radiative B-meson decays.

hep-ph↗

arXiv1996

Quantum effects on $t\to H^{+} b$ in the MSSM: a window to ``virtual'' supersymmetry?

We analyze the one-loop effects (strong and electroweak) on the unconventional top quark decay mode $t\rightarrow H^{+} b$ within the MSSM. The results are presented in the on-shell renormalization scheme with a physically well motivated definition of $\tanβ$. The study of this process at the quantum level is useful to unravel the potential supersymmetric nature of the charged Higgs emerging from that decay. As compared with the standard mode $t\rightarrow W^{+} b$, the corrections to $t\rightarrow H^{+} b$ are large, slowly decoupling and persist at a sizeable level even for all sparticle masses well above the LEP 200 discovery range. As a matter of fact, the potential size of the SUSY effects, which amount to corrections of several ten percent, could counterbalance the standard QCD corrections and even make them to appear with the ``wrong'' sign. Therefore, if the charged Higgs decay of the top quark is kinematically allowed -a possibility which is not excluded by the recent measurements of the branching ratio $BR(t\rightarrow W^{+} b)$ at the Tevatron - it could be an invaluable laboratory to search for ``virtual'' supersymmetry. While a first significant test of these effects could possibly be performed at the upgraded Tevatron, a more precise verification would most likely be carried out in future experiments at the LHC.

hep-ph↗

arXiv1995

Matching the Low and High Energy Determinations of $α_s(M_z)$ in the MSSM

Recent calculations of supersymmetric corrections to the conflicting ratios $R_b$ and $R_c$ have shown that an alleged discrepancy between the SM predictions of these observables and the corresponding experimental values can be cured in the MSSM within a certain region of the parameter space. Here we show that, in this very same region, also a well-known discrepancy between the low and high energy determinations of $α_s(M_Z)$ can be disposed of. Specifically, we find that the lineshape determination of the strong coupling constant, which in the SM points towards the large central value $α_s(M_Z) \stackrel{\scriptstyle >}{{ }_{\sim}} 0.125$, can be matched up with the value suggested by the wealth of low-energy data, namely $α_s(M_Z) \simeq 0.11$, which is smaller and more in line with the traditional QCD expectations at low energy. Our approach differs from previous analyses in that we argue that the desired matching could originate to a large extent from a purely electroweak supersymmetric quantum effect.

hep-ph↗