Authors:
James Joshi, Calton Pu
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Abstract
On behalf of the Editorial Board and the Advisory
Board, we are pleased to welcome all to the inaugural issue
of the EAI Endorsed Transactions on Collaborative
Computing. This journal reflects the increasing maturity of
the growing community of researchers involved in various
areas of collaborative systems, networks, infrastructures and
applications. The journal is also aligned with our IEEE/EAI
International Conference on Collaborative Computing:
Networking, Applications and Worksharing (IEEE/EAI
CollaborateCom) which has nurtured the community. We
could not find a better timing for this inaugural issue than
the 10th anniversary of IEEE/EAI CollaborateCom that will
be held in Miami, USA on Oct 22-25, 2014.
Given the ongoing rapid advances in computing and
information technologies, we see unprecedented
collaboration opportunities for individuals and distributed
teams of humans, computer systems and applications, and
highly heterogeneous computing devices. The contributions
from the community have evolved from standalone tools to
open systems, and further, from general purpose tools to
specialized collaboration infrastructures that facilitate
intensive collaboration in multi-organizational settings,
reaching towards global scale social interactions and
worksharing. Such collaboration-enhancing technologies
enable large and globally dispersed organizations to achieve
a much higher level of productivity and efficiency while
accelerating innovation.
The goal of this journal is to serve as a premier
international venue for publishing innovative and cutting
edge research results in theory as well as applied systems,
applications and networking areas that enable intensive and
efficient collaboration across and among networked cyberphysical and social systems and applications, individuals as
well as enterprises. Novel collaboration solutions that fully
realize the promises of electronic collaboration, and pushes
the limits of human endeavor, productivity and discovery
require innovations and advancements in broad areas of
computing including networking, systems and applications,
user interfaces and interaction paradigms, and seamless
interoperation among system, network and applicationspecific components and tools. Sample topics of interest
include, but are not limited to:
Participatory sensing, crowdsourcing, and citizen
science,
Theoretical foundations and algorithms for
collaborative networks, applications, and
infrastructures,
Architectures, protocols, and enabling technologies for
collaborative networks, systems and applications
Autonomic computing and quality of services in
collaborative networks, systems, and applications
Collaboration in context-aware, pervasive, cloud
computing, and social networking environments
Cyber physical and Cyber human environments, and
Internet of Things (IoT)
Collaborative multimedia systems/applications, large
scale databases and BigData
Collaboration in e-health, e-learning, e-government, and
digital libraries
Collaborative network infrastructures such as body area
networks, wireless sensor networks, VANETS, mobile
networks, etc.
Models and mechanisms for real-time and large scale
collaboration, information and work sharing
Security, privacy, resiliency/survivability and trust
management in collaborative networks, systems, and
applications
Simulation, performance evaluation, experiments, and
case studies of collaborative environments
Collaborative web services technologies, business
processes, workflows, and service-oriented systems and
architectures
Etc.Keywords : Welcome Message from the Editors-in-Chief
Authors:
Elisa Bertino, Dimitrios Georgakopoulos, Surya Nepal, Mudhakar Srivatsa, Alessandro Vinciarelli
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Abstract
This issue of EAI Transactions on Collaborative
Computing includes extended versions of articles selected
from the program of the 9th IEEE International Conference
on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and
Worksharing (CollaborateCom 2013), which was held
during October 20-23, 2013, in Austin, Texas USA. The
final program had 20 research papers, 23 application papers,
2 industry papers, 11 invited papers, 3 keynotes, 2 panels,
and 2 full day workshops. Five research papers were invited
for submission for this special issue of EAI Transactions on
Collaborative Computing.
The journal submissions were substantially extended and
went through an additional review process by selected
members of the CollaborateCom 2013 program committee
as well as external reviewers.
The first article “Is Email Business Dying?: A Study on
Evolution of Email Spam Over Fifteen Years”, by De Wang,
Danesh Irani, and Calton Pu, analyses 5.5 million spam
emails over 15 years (1998 – 2013) and explores the real
trend of email spam. The paper uses the topic modelling and
network analysis techniques to understand the behaviours of
spammers. The paper concludes that the email spam
business is still alive and has become more capricious. It is
also found that spammers changed topics over time to attract
users.
The second article “A Game Theoretic Approach for
Modeling Privacy Settings of an Online Social Network”, by
Jundong Chen, Ankunda Kiremire, Matthias Brust, and Vir
Phoha, studies the privacy settings in social networks
analyzing the behavior of users using a variety of factors
such as attribute importance, benefit, risk and network
topology. The paper uses a game-theoretical model that
enables users to adjust their privacy settings according to
certain strategy options. The results show that the most
important attributes exhibit higher levels of revelation than
the least important attributes. The paper also found that the
network topology exhibits a considerable effect on the
privacy in an environment with high level of risks.
The third article “A Collaborative Virtual Workspace for
Factory Configuration and Evaluation” by Ingo Zinnikus,
Sergiy Byelozyorov, Xiaoqi Cao, Matthias Klusch,
Christopher Krauss, Andreas Nonnengart, Torsten
Spieldenner, Stefan Warwas, and Philipp Slusallek,
presents a collaborative, synchronized web-based
framework to create 3D scenarios for product design,
simulation and training assisted by animated avatars. The
paper uses the service-oriented approach which enables easy
extension of the framework by developing plugins and
adapting it to specific use-case scenarios.
The fourth article “MOSDEN: A Scalable Mobile
Collaborative Platform for Opportunistic Sensing
Applications” by Prem Prakash Jayaraman, Charith Perera,
Dimitrios Georgakopoulos, and Arkady Zaslavsky, proposes
a mobile collaborative platform called MOSDEN that
enables and supports opportunistic sensing at run time. The
key features of the platform include: capturing and sharing
sensor data across multiple applications, devices and users;
supporting separation of sensors from application-specific
processing, storing and sharing; promotion of reuse and repurposing of sensor data. The proposed framework has been
implemented on Android-based smartphones and tablets.
The fifth article “Harnessing Context for Vandalism
Detection in Wikipedia” by Lakshmish Ramaswamy, Raga
Sowmya Tummalapenta, Deepika Sethi, Kang Li, and
Calton Pu, proposes a context-based vandalism detection
framework for Wikipedia to detect the vandalism. This
paper identifies two distinct types of context that are
potentially valuable for vandalism detection, namely
content-context and contributor-context, and use them in
their framework. Their experimental results show that the
accuracy of vandalism detection can be improved
significantly by utilizing context.
We strongly believe the readers will find these papers
interesting and useful, and we hope that they will enjoy
them.Keywords : Guest Editorial, IEEE IEEE/EAI CollaborateCom 2013
Authors:
De Wang, Danesh Irani, Calton Pu
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Abstract
With the increasing dedication and sophistication of spammers, email spam is a persistent problem even today. Popular social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are not exempt from email spam as they all interface with email systems. While some report predicts that email spam business is dying due to the decreasing volume of email spam. Whether email spam business is really dying is an interesting question. In this paper, we analyze email spam trends on Spam Archive dataset, which contains 5.5 million spam emails over 15 years (1998 – 2013). We statistically analyze emails contents including header information (e.g. content type) and embedded items (e.g. URL links). Also, we investigate topic drift using topic modeling technique. Moreover, we perform network analysis on sender-to-receiver IP routing networks. Our study shows the dynamic nature of email spam over one and a half decades and demonstrate that the email spam business is not dying but more capricious.Keywords : email, spam, evolution
Authors:
Jundong Chen, Ankunda R. Kiremire, Matthias R. Brust, Vir V. Phoha
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Abstract
Users of online social networks often adjust their privacy settings to control how much information on their profiles is accessible to other users of the networks. While a variety of factors have been shown to affect the privacy strategies of these users, very little work has been done in analyzing how these factors influence each other and collectively contribute towards the users’ privacy strategies. In this paper, we analyze the influence of attribute importance, benefit, risk and network topology on the users’ attribute disclosure behavior by introducing a weighted evolutionary game model. Results show that: irrespective of risk, users aremore likely to reveal theirmost important attributes than their least important attributes; when the users’ range of influence is increased, the risk factor plays a smaller role in attribute disclosure; the network topology exhibits a considerable effect on the privacy in an environment with risk.Keywords : game theory, social network, privacy settings, network topology
Authors:
Prem Prakash Jayaraman, Charith Perera, Dimitrios Georgakopoulos, Arkady Zaslavsky
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Abstract
Mobile smartphones along with embedded sensors have become an efficient enabler for various mobile applications including opportunistic sensing. The hi-tech advances in smartphones are opening up a world of possibilities. This paper proposes a mobile collaborative platform called MOSDEN that enables and supports opportunistic sensing at run time. MOSDEN captures and shares sensor data acrossmultiple apps, smartphones and users. MOSDEN supports the emerging trend of separating sensors from application-specific processing, storing and sharing. MOSDEN promotes reuse and re-purposing of sensor data hence reducing the efforts in developing novel opportunistic sensing applications. MOSDEN has been implemented on Android-based smartphones and tablets. Experimental evaluations validate the scalability and energy efficiency of MOSDEN and its suitability towards real world applications. The results of evaluation and lessons learned are presented and discussed in this paper.Keywords : opportunistic sensing, crowdsensing, mobile middleware, mobile data analytics
Authors:
Lakshmish Ramaswamy, Raga Sowmya Tummalapenta, Deepika Sethi, Kang Li, Calton Pu
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Abstract
The importance of collaborative social media (CSM) applications such as Wikipedia to modern free societies can hardly be overemphasized. By allowing end users to freely create and edit content, Wikipedia has greatly facilitated democratization of information. However, over the past several years, Wikipedia has also become susceptible to vandalism, which has adversely affected its information quality. Traditional vandalism detection techniques that rely upon simple textual features such as spammy or abusive words have not been very effective in combating sophisticated vandal attacks that do not contain common vandalism markers. In this paper, we propose a context-based vandalism detection framework for Wikipedia. We first propose a contextenhanced finite state model for representing the context evolution ofWikipedia articles. This paper identifies two distinct types of context that are potentially valuable for vandalism detection, namely content-context and contributor-context. The distinguishing powers of these contexts are discussed by providing empirical results. We design two novel metrics for measuring how well the content-context of an incoming edit fits into the topic and the existing content of a Wikipedia article. We outline machine learning-based vandalism identification schemes that utilize these metrics. Our experiments indicate that utilizing context can substantially improve vandalism detection accuracy.Keywords : Collaborative Social Media, Vandalism, Content-context, Contributor-context
Authors:
Mahadev Satyanarayanan, Vasanth Bala, Gloriana St. Clair, Erika Linke
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Abstract
Executable content is of growing importance in many domains. How does one share and archive such content at Internet-scale for spatial and temporal collaboration? Spatial collaboration refers to the classic concept of user collaboration: two or more users who are at different Internet locations performing a task using shared context. Temporal collaboration refers to the archiving of context by one user and use of that context by another user, possibly many years or decades later. The term “shared context” has typically meant shared documents or a shared workspace such as a whiteboard. However, executable content forces us to think differently. Just specifying a standardized data format is not sufficient; one has to accurately reproduce computation. We observe that the precise encapsulation of computing state provided by a virtual machine (VM) may help us solve this problem. We can cope with large VM size through a streaming mechanism that demand fetches memory and disk state during execution. Based on our positive initial experience with VMs for archiving execution state, we propose the creation of Olive, an Internet ecosystem of curated VM image collections.Keywords : virtual machine monitors, file systems, operating systems, open source software, archival storage
Authors:
Ingo Zinnikus, Sergiy Byelozyorov, Xiaoqi Cao, Matthias Klusch, Christopher Krauss
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Abstract
The convergence of information technologies (IT) has enabled the Digital Enterprise in which engineering, production planning, manufacturing and sales processes are supported by IT-based collaboration, simulation and enactment. As a result, borders between reality and its virtual representations become increasingly blurred. Advanced tools need to support flexibility, specialization and collaborative evolution of the design where the exchange of knowledge between domain experts helps to improve informed decision making. In this paper, we present a collaborative, synchronized web-based framework to create 3D scenarios for product design, simulation and training assisted by animated avatars.Keywords : Collaborative computing architectures and networks, Computer supported collaborative work, Web-based collaboration, Visualization techniques for collaborative networks and applications, Service-oriented architectures for collaborative networking and applications
Authors:
James Jun, Calton Pu
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Abstract
We are very pleased to welcome you all to the second
issue of this journal. In this issue, we present six selected
invited papers that span various aspects of collaborative
computing and technologies. In particular, the themes of the
papers cover Crowdsourcing, a collaborative approach to
secure and oblivious storage, a virtual network infrastructure
to enable collaboration, collaborative social navigation
support for way-finding for people with disabilities, a
collaborative approach to sharing information in social
networks, and an approach to understand collaboration and
coordination among members in a community. This issue,
thus, aims to highlight the role of collaboration technologies
and techniques in highly diverse application domains. We
thank the authors for their valuable contributions.
In “Reconciling Schema Matching Networks Through
Crowdsourcing,” authors Viet Hung, Thanh Tam, Miklós
and Aberer propose to use crowdsourcing techniques to
address the challenge of schema matching during data
integration. The proposed Crowdsourcing technique tries to
validate the correspondences between the attributes of
database schema generated by a large group of people who
are non-experts. The work assumes that there is a need to
have attribute correspondences established not just between
two schemas but also in a network. However, there is a
potentially inherent unreliability issue with regards to the
users’ inputs in Crowdsourcing. The authors propose using
integrity and consistency constraints to improve the process.
They show that such constraints improve aggregated
answers, and also help estimate better the quality of answers
of each worker and detect potential spammers.
Frikken, Wang and Atallah in “A Scheme for
Collaboratively Processing Nearest Neighbor Queries in
Oblivious Storage” address the issue related to
confidentiality of both the outsourced data as well as the
patterns of access to that data. They propose an extension of
the existing Oblivious Storage semantics to include an
oblivious index. The proposed oblivious index supports
finding the keys nearest to the query in the key-value store.
The authors show that the extension has performance that is
similar to the existing Oblivious Storage schemes in terms
of storage at both clients and servers, as well as the rounds
of communication involved.
Juste, Jeong, Eom, Baker and Figueiredo in “TinCan:
User-Defined P2P Virtual Network Overlays for Ad-hoc
Collaboration,” propose a virtual network called TinCan
that is based on peer-to-peer private tunnels. Such virtual
private networks are important for collaborative
environments to provide private, authenticated
communication between collaborating partners that belong
to multiple institutions and are potentially mobile. The paper
presents the architecture and design of TinCan which goes
beyond the traditional centralized VPN based approaches.
They also present a prototype that supports Windows,
Linux, and Android mobile devices, and its experimental
evaluation.
In “Wayfinding and Navigation for People with
Disabilities Using Social Navigation Networks,” authors
Karimi, Dias, Pearlman and Zimmerman focus on issues
related to safe and independent mobility associated with
navigation of unfamiliar indoor as well as outdoor
environments. They argue that despite great advances in
technologies, the existing solutions for way-finding and
navigation do not appropriately address the needs of the
people with disabilities (PWDs). The authors further argue
that such limitations exist because there is a lack of
experience centric approach integrated into these systems
and services. They propose using a hybrid approach where
the compute-centric and experience-centric methods are
combined to overcome such shortcomings to support the
needs of the PWDs.Keywords : Message from the Editors-in-Chief
Authors:
Nguyen Quoc Viet Hung, Nguyen Thanh Tam, Zoltán Miklós, Karl Aberer
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Abstract
for data integration purposes. Although several automatic schema matching tools have been developed, their results are often incomplete or erroneous. To obtain a correct set of correspondences, usually human effort is required to validate the generated correspondences. This validation process is often costly, as it is performed by highly skilled experts. Our paper analyzes how to leverage crowdsourcing techniques to validate the generated correspondences by a large group of non-experts. In our work we assume that one needs to establish attribute correspondences not only between two schemas but in a network. We also assume that the matching is realized in a pairwise fashion, in the presence of consistency expectations about the network of attribute correspondences. We demonstrate that formulating these expectations in the form of integrity constraints can improve the process of reconciliation. As in the case of crowdsourcing the user’s input is unreliable, we need specific aggregation techniques to obtain good quality. We demonstrate that consistency constraints can not only improve the quality of aggregated answers, but they also enable us to more reliably estimate the quality answers of individual workers and detect spammers. Moreover, these constraints also enable to minimize the necessary human effort needed, for the same expected quality of results.Keywords : data integration, schema matching, crowdsourcing, worker assessment, user effort
Authors:
Keith B. Frikken, Shumiao Wang, Mikhail J. Atallah
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Abstract
Security concerns are a substantial impediment to the wider deployment of cloud storage. There are two main concerns on the confidentiality of outsourced data: i) protecting the data, and ii) protecting the access pattern (i.e., which data is being accessed). To mitigate these concerns, schemes for Oblivious Storage (OS) have been proposed. In OS, the data owner outsources a key-value store to a cloud server, and then can later execute get, put, and remove queries, by collaboration with the server; furthermore, both the data and the access pattern are hidden from the server. In this paper, we extend the semantics of OS by proposing an oblivious index that supports nearest neighbor queries. That is, finding the nearest keys to the query in the key-value store. Our proposed index structure for supporting nearest-neighbor has similar performance bounds to previous OS schemes that did not support nearest-neighbor, in terms of client storage, server storage and rounds of communication.Keywords : Collaborative Cloud Storage, Oblivious Storage, Collaboration in Cloud Computing
Authors:
Pierre St Juste, Kyuho Jeong, Heungsik Eom, Corey Baker, Renato Figueiredo
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Abstract
Virtual private networking (VPN) has become an increasingly important component of a collaboration environment because it ensures private, authenticated communication among participants, using existing collaboration tools, where users are distributed across multiple institutions and can be mobile. The majority of current VPN solutions are based on a centralized VPN model, where all IP traffic is tunneled through a VPN gateway. Nonetheless, there are several use case scenarios that require a model where end-to-end VPN links are tunneled upon existing Internet infrastructure in a peer-to-peer (P2P) fashion, removing the bottleneck of a centralized VPN gateway. We propose a novel virtual network — TinCan — based on peerto-peer private network tunnels. It reuses existing standards and implementations of services for discovery notification (XMPP), reflection (STUN) and relaying (TURN), facilitating configuration. In this approach, trust relationships maintained by centralized (or federated) services are automatically mapped to TinCan links. In one use scenario, TinCan allows unstructured P2P overlays connecting trusted end-user devices — while only requiring VPN software on user devices and leveraging online social network (OSN) infrastructure already widely deployed. This paper describes the architecture and design of TinCan and presents an experimental evaluation of a prototype supporting Windows, Linux, and Android mobile devices. Results quantify the overhead introduced by the network virtualization layer, and the resource requirements imposed on services needed to bootstrap TinCan links.Keywords : vpn, peer-to-peer, networking, privacy, virtual organization
Authors:
Hassan A. Karimi, M. Bernardine Dias, Jonathan Pearlman, George J. Zimmerman
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Abstract
To achieve safe and independent mobility, people usually depend on published information, prior experience, the knowledge of others, and/or technology to navigate unfamiliar outdoor and indoor environments. Today, due to advances in various technologies, wayfinding and navigation systems and services are commonplace and are accessible on desktop, laptop, and mobile devices. However, despite their popularity and widespread use, current wayfinding and navigation solutions often fail to address the needs of people with disabilities (PWDs). We argue that these shortcomings are primarily due to the ubiquity of the compute-centric approach adopted in these systems and services, where they do not benefit from the experience-centric approach. We propose that following a hybrid approach of combining experience-centric and compute-centric methods will overcome the shortcomings of current wayfinding and navigation solutions for PWDs.Keywords : wayfinding, navigation, social navigation networks, people with disabilities, assistive technology
Authors:
Davide Albertini, Barbara Carminati, Elena Ferrari
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Abstract
In last few years, Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become one of the most used platforms for sharing data (e.g., pictures, short texts) on the Internet. Nowadays Facebook and Twitter are the most popular OSN providers, though they implement different social models. However, independently from the social model they implement, OSN platforms have become a widespread repository of personal information. All these data (e.g., profile information, shared elements, users’ likes) are stored in a centralized repository that can be exploited for data mining and marketing analysis. With this data collection process, lots of sensitive information are gathered by OSN providers that, in time, have become more and more targeted by malicious attackers. To overcome this problem, in this paper we present an architectural framework that, by means of a Social Application registered in Facebook, allows users to move their data (e.g., relationships, resources) outside the OSN realm and to store them in the public Cloud. Given that the public Cloud is not a secure and private environment, our proposal provides users security and privacy guarantees over their data by encrypting the resources and by anonymizing their social graphs. The presented framework enforces Relationship-Based Access Control (ReBAC) rules over the anonymized social graph, providing OSN users the possibility to selectively share information and resources as they are used to do in Facebook.Keywords : Online Social Networks; Collaborative graph anonymization; Controlled information sharing; Privacypreserving path finding
Authors:
Yu-Ru Lin, Drew Margolin, David Lazer
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Abstract
Developing technologies that support collaboration requires understanding how knowledge and expertise are shared and distributed among community members. We explore two forms of knowledge distribution structures, coordination and cooperation, that are central to successful collaboration. We propose a novel method for detecting the coordination of strategic communication among members of political communities. Our method identifies a “rapid semantic convergence,” a sudden burst in the use linguistic constructions by multiple individuals within a short time, as a signature of coordination. We apply our method to the public statements of U.S. Senators in the 112th U.S. Congress and construct coordination and cooperation networks among these individuals. We then compare aspects of these networks to other known properties of the Senators. Results indicate that the detected networks reflect underlying tendencies in the social relationships among Senators and reveal interesting differences in how the different parties coordinate communication.Keywords : semantic burst, semantic convergence, burst detection, coordination, cooperation, social networks, public statement, political network, strategic communications
