Social Networks on the Cloud

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Social Networks on the Cloud

• Evimaria Terzi
• Boston University

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Social Networks on the Cloud

• Yesterday at noon....

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Social Networks on the Cloud?

• ...at midnight....

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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

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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?
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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?

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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?

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Centrality

• Definition
• number of information pathways controlled by the
  nodes
• Computation
• Intensive computational task
• Enumerating information pathways is demanding

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Challenges in centrality computations

• Centrality of nodes and groups of nodes
• Context-based centrality
• Centrality of nodes in dynamic graphs

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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....

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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

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Beyond centrality New types of queries

• Leverage cloud infrustructure to support
  social-network-specific queries
• Centrality
• Community detection
• Trend identification

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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

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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

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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

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One last perspective

• Cloud provides computing power
• Social networks have hidden man power
• How about human computations?