Identifying trust relationship for private data sharing in online social networks

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering


PhD Thesis Defence


Title: "Identifying trust relationship for private data sharing in
online social networks"

By

Miss Dan Hong


Abstract

With the development of Web 2.0 and sensing technologies, private 
information such as email messages, health records, discussion histories, 
could be obtained by Web visitors easily. Private data owners often have 
no idea about who are accessing the data and for what purposes. The rising 
popularity of various social networking websites has created a huge 
problem on privacy. In this thesis, we investigate the private data 
sharing problem among Web users in online social networks. A framework is 
proposed for private data management by extending existing Web privacy 
management techniques. We propose to build a ''trust network'' with 
transitive relationship to allow controlled data sharing so that the 
privacy and preferences of data owners can be managed. We study how to 
obtain a trust relationship 1) from existing relationships in social 
network, 2) from user activity log where trust is dynamically changed and 
3) from published data when users are located in different social 
networks. Popular applications are used to demonstrate the usefulness of 
the trust network.


Date:			Monday, 22 June 2009

Time:			10:30a.m.-12:30p.m.

Venue:			Room 3501
 			Lifts 25-26

Chairman:		Prof. Alexis Lau (CIVL)

Committee Members:	Prof. Vincent Shen (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Lei Chen
 			Prof. Frederick Lochovsky
 			Prof. Larry Farh (MGTO)
 			Prof. Michael Lyu (Comp. Sci. & Engg., CUHK)


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