Tutorial 1: Multimedia Social Networks: Behavior Dynamics, Security, and Beyond

Presented by

H. Vicky Zhao, Yan (Lindsay) Sun

Abstract

In the past decade, we witness the emergence of large-scale multimedia social network communities such as Napster, Facebook and YouTube, where millions of users form a dynamically changing infrastructure to share multimedia content. This proliferation of multimedia data creates a technological revolution to the entertainment and media industries, brings new experience to users, and introduces the new concept of web-based social networking communities. The massive production and use of multimedia also pose new challenges to the scalable and reliable sharing of multimedia over large and heterogeneous networks; demand effective management of enormous amount of unstructured media objects that users create, share, link and reuse; and raise critical issues of protecting intellectual property of multimedia.

In large-scale multimedia social networks, millions of users actively interact with each other, and such user dynamics not only influence each individual user but also affect the system performance. To provide a predictable and satisfactory level of service, it is of ample importance to analyze the impact of human factors on multimedia social networks, and to provide important guidelines to better design of multimedia systems. The area of human and social dynamics has recently been identified by US NSF as one of its five priority areas, which also demonstrates the importance of this emerging interdisciplinary research area.

The proposed tutorial aims to illustrate why human factors are important, to show that signal processing can be effectively used to model user dynamics, and to demonstrate how such understanding of human behavior can help improve the system performance and security. We will cover recent advance in multimedia social networks, and study different types of multimedia social networks, including peer-to-peer live streaming social networks, online rating/review social communities, and multimedia fingerprinting social networks. We will review the fundamental methodologies to model and analyze human behavior, and investigate the impact of human dynamics on multimedia system design. Our goal is to encourage researchers from different areas to further explore the emerging research field of behavior modeling and forensics, to improve our understanding of user dynamics in multimedia social networks, and ultimately to design systems with more efficient, secure and personalized services.

Speaker Biography

H. Vicky Zhao received the B.S. and M.S. degree from Tsinghua University, China, in 1997 and 1999, respectively, and the Ph. D degree from University of Maryland, College Park, in 2004, all in electrical engineering. She was a Research Associate with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park from Jan. 2005 to July 2006. Since August 2006, she has been an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

Dr. Zhao's research interests include information security and forensics, multimedia social networks, digital communications and signal processing. Dr. Zhao received the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) 2008 Young Author Best Paper Award. She co-authored the book "Multimedia Fingerprinting Forensics for Traitor Tracing" (Hindawi, 2005). She is the Associate Editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letters and Journal of Visual Communications and Image Representation.

Yan (Lindsay) Sun received her B.S. degree with the highest honor from Peking University, Beijing, China, in 1998, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Maryland in 2004. She has been an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Rhode Island since 2004. Her research interests include trustworthy social computing, network security and wireless networking. Dr. Sun received the Graduate School Fellowship at the University of Maryland from 1998 to 1999, and the Excellent Graduate Award of Peking University in 1998. She received NSF Career Award in 2007. She co-authored the book “Network-aware security for group communications” (Springer 2007).