Social Networks on the Cloud

Evimaria TerziBoston University

Social Networks on the Cloud

Yesterday at noon....

Social Networks on the Cloud?

...at midnight....

We are all (together) on the cloud

Could that be more social?

Everything you tweet, facebook, linkedin to ....and pretty much everything we do is connected to the cloud...and seems to be working

We are all (together) on the cloud

Could that be more social?

Everything you tweet, facebook, linkedin to ....and pretty much everything we do is connected to the cloud and seems to be working.

So, are we done?

Where I am coming from

The world of “simple” problems... (as in simply stated)

Which are the “central” nodes in a social network? Whom should I follow on Twitter? Which blogs should I read? Which scientists are central figures in a domain?

Where I am coming from

The world of “simple” problems... (as in simply stated)

What is my centrality in a social network? How central am I on Facebook? How central am I in the scientific community?

Centrality

Definition: number of information pathways controlled by the

nodes

Computation: Intensive computational task Enumerating information pathways is demanding

Challenges in centrality computations

Centrality of nodes and groups of nodes

Context-based centrality

Centrality of nodes in dynamic graphs

Benefits from centrality computations

Imagine if... you knew (and could monitor) your centrality score you knew (and could monitor) your friends centrality score you could know the set of central nodes in a network

Benefits to: Individuals Businesses News agencies/political campaign designers Recruiting agencies....

Centrality and the Cloud

Centrality is computationally-intensive task; cloud can provide computational resources

Challenges: efficient execution of such queries number of (concurrent) users dataset sizes evolving graphs

Beyond centrality: New types of queries

Leverage cloud infrustructure to support social-network-specific queries

Centrality Community detection Trend identification

Going back to my simple world

How can we protect the privacy of social-network users? Anonymity,differential privacy, privacy

scores

Privacy issues on the cloud All our data is on the cloud All our queries are asked to the cloud Cloud knows everything

Privacy-preserving data management on the cloud

How can we protect the privacy of social-network users? Anonymity,differential privacy, privacy scores

Privacy issues on the cloud All our data is on the cloud All our queries are asked to the cloud Cloud knows everything

Opportunities for privacy-preserving data management research

Summary

Social networks are on the cloud

Unresolved issues Leverage the cloud to add more functionalities to

social networks (i.e., facilitate new types of queries) Protect the privacy of individuals

Unresolved issues are good for a relationship and for researchers

One last perspective

Cloud provides computing power

Social networks have hidden man power

How about human computations?