arXiv subjects

Kui Wu

Publications and source records attributed to Kui Wu.

79 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2013

The Best Answers? Think Twice: Online Detection of Commercial Campaigns in the CQA Forums

In an emerging trend, more and more Internet users search for information from Community Question and Answer (CQA) websites, as interactive communication in such websites provides users with a rare feeling of trust. More often than not, end users look for instant help when they browse the CQA websites for the best answers. Hence, it is imperative that they should be warned of any potential commercial campaigns hidden behind the answers. However, existing research focuses more on the quality of answers and does not meet the above need. In this paper, we develop a system that automatically analyzes the hidden patterns of commercial spam and raises alarms instantaneously to end users whenever a potential commercial campaign is detected. Our detection method integrates semantic analysis and posters' track records and utilizes the special features of CQA websites largely different from those in other types of forums such as microblogs or news reports. Our system is adaptive and accommodates new evidence uncovered by the detection algorithms over time. Validated with real-world trace data from a popular Chinese CQA website over a period of three months, our system shows great potential towards adaptive online detection of CQA spams.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2011

Battling the Internet Water Army: Detection of Hidden Paid Posters

We initiate a systematic study to help distinguish a special group of online users, called hidden paid posters, or termed "Internet water army" in China, from the legitimate ones. On the Internet, the paid posters represent a new type of online job opportunity. They get paid for posting comments and new threads or articles on different online communities and websites for some hidden purposes, e.g., to influence the opinion of other people towards certain social events or business markets. Though an interesting strategy in business marketing, paid posters may create a significant negative effect on the online communities, since the information from paid posters is usually not trustworthy. When two competitive companies hire paid posters to post fake news or negative comments about each other, normal online users may feel overwhelmed and find it difficult to put any trust in the information they acquire from the Internet. In this paper, we thoroughly investigate the behavioral pattern of online paid posters based on real-world trace data. We design and validate a new detection mechanism, using both non-semantic analysis and semantic analysis, to identify potential online paid posters. Our test results with real-world datasets show a very promising performance.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2011

A Stochastic Calculus for Network Systems with Renewable Energy Sources

We consider the performance modeling and evaluation of network systems powered with renewable energy sources such as solar and wind energy. Such energy sources largely depend on environmental conditions, which are hard to predict accurately. As such, it may only make sense to require the network systems to support a soft quality of service (QoS) guarantee, i.e., to guarantee a service requirement with a certain high probability. In this paper, we intend to build a solid mathematical foundation to help better understand the stochastic energy constraint and the inherent correlation between QoS and the uncertain energy supply. We utilize a calculus approach to model the cumulative amount of charged energy and the cumulative amount of consumed energy. We derive upper and lower bounds on the remaining energy level based on a stochastic energy charging rate and a stochastic energy discharging rate. By building the bridge between energy consumption and task execution (i.e., service), we study the QoS guarantee under the constraint of uncertain energy sources. We further show how performance bounds can be improved if some strong assumptions can be made.

cs.PF↗

arXiv2010

Statistical Behavior of Embeddedness and Communities of Overlapping Cliques in Online Social Networks

Degree distribution of nodes, especially a power law degree distribution, has been regarded as one of the most significant structural characteristics of social and information networks. Node degree, however, only discloses the first-order structure of a network. Higher-order structures such as the edge embeddedness and the size of communities may play more important roles in many online social networks. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence on the existence of rich higherorder structural characteristics in online social networks, develop mathematical models to interpret and model these characteristics, and discuss their various applications in practice. In particular, 1) We show that the embeddedness distribution of social links in many social networks has interesting and rich behavior that cannot be captured by well-known network models. We also provide empirical results showing a clear correlation between the embeddedness distribution and the average number of messages communicated between pairs of social network nodes. 2) We formally prove that random k-tree, a recent model for complex networks, has a power law embeddedness distribution, and show empirically that the random k-tree model can be used to capture the rich behavior of higherorder structures we observed in real-world social networks. 3) Going beyond the embeddedness, we show that a variant of the random k-tree model can be used to capture the power law distribution of the size of communities of overlapping cliques discovered recently.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2010

On the Model Transform in Stochastic Network Calculus

Stochastic network calculus requires special care in the search of proper stochastic traffic arrival models and stochastic service models. Tradeoff must be considered between the feasibility for the analysis of performance bounds, the usefulness of performance bounds, and the ease of their numerical calculation. In theory, transform between different traffic arrival models and transform between different service models are possible. Nevertheless, the impact of the model transform on performance bounds has not been thoroughly investigated. This paper is to investigate the effect of the model transform and to provide practical guidance in the model selection in stochastic network calculus.

cs.PF↗

arXiv2008

Fast and Quality-Guaranteed Data Streaming in Resource-Constrained Sensor Networks

In many emerging applications, data streams are monitored in a network environment. Due to limited communication bandwidth and other resource constraints, a critical and practical demand is to online compress data streams continuously with quality guarantee. Although many data compression and digital signal processing methods have been developed to reduce data volume, their super-linear time and more-than-constant space complexity prevents them from being applied directly on data streams, particularly over resource-constrained sensor networks. In this paper, we tackle the problem of online quality guaranteed compression of data streams using fast linear approximation (i.e., using line segments to approximate a time series). Technically, we address two versions of the problem which explore quality guarantees in different forms. We develop online algorithms with linear time complexity and constant cost in space. Our algorithms are optimal in the sense they generate the minimum number of segments that approximate a time series with the required quality guarantee. To meet the resource constraints in sensor networks, we also develop a fast algorithm which creates connecting segments with very simple computation. The low cost nature of our methods leads to a unique edge on the applications of massive and fast streaming environment, low bandwidth networks, and heavily constrained nodes in computational power. We implement and evaluate our methods in the application of an acoustic wireless sensor network.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2008

Performance Modeling and Evaluation for Information-Driven Networks

Information-driven networks include a large category of networking systems, where network nodes are aware of information delivered and thus can not only forward data packets but may also perform information processing. In many situations, the quality of service (QoS) in information-driven networks is provisioned with the redundancy in information. Traditional performance models generally adopt evaluation measures suitable for packet-oriented service guarantee, such as packet delay, throughput, and packet loss rate. These performance measures, however, do not align well with the actual need of information-driven networks. New performance measures and models for information-driven networks, despite their importance, have been mainly blank, largely because information processing is clearly application dependent and cannot be easily captured within a generic framework. To fill the vacancy, we present a new performance evaluation framework particularly tailored for information-driven networks, based on the recent development of stochastic network calculus. We analyze the QoS with respect to information delivery and study the scheduling problem with the new performance metrics. Our analytical framework can be used to calculate the network capacity in information delivery and in the meantime to help transmission scheduling for a large body of systems where QoS is stochastically guaranteed with the redundancy in information.

cs.PF↗