Speaker: Mr. Amin Milani Fard
M.Sc., School of Computing Science
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada
Title: Social Networks Analysis: Opportunities and Challenges
Local Host: Dr. Mohsen Kahani
Time: Wednesday, August 19th, 2009, 10:00am
Location: Ferdowsi University of Mashhad
Abstract:
Social network services focus on building online communities for sharing interests and activities. The hidden knowledge of these networks is regarded as an important resource for many investigations in finding groups, mutual trust/interest analysis, identity analysis, query propagation, social capital, business process and many more. Social network analysis (SNA) studies the graphs and complex networks modeling to study many complex human and natural phenomena among people, groups, organizations, and etc. On the other hand, such data analysis is often restricted by data privacy laws which made privacy preserving publishing of social network data an important issue. This privacy protection is actually beyond just simply replacing the identifying attributes of individuals. Several algorithms for preserving privacy in relational data have been proposed; however most of them can not be straightforward extended to social networks. In fact social network data anonymization is a much more challenging problem considering the more complicated background knowledge modeling of adversaries for attacks, and also the more challenging information loss measurement in comparison to the relational data. Regarding above mentioned difficulties, except some recent work the privacy concerns associated with social network analysis have been ignored.