The serious privacy and security problems related to online social networks (OSNs) are what fueled two complementary studies as part of this thesis. In the first study, we developed a general algorithm for the mining of data of targeted organizations by using Facebook (currently the most popular OSN) and socialbots. By friending employees in a targeted organization, our active socialbots were able to find new employees and informal organizational links that we could not find by crawling with passive socialbots. We evaluated our method on the Facebook OSN and were able to reconstruct the social networks of employees in three distinct, actual organizations. Furthermore, in the crawling process with our active socialbots we discovered up to 13.55% more employees and 22.27% more informal organizational links in contrast to the crawling process that was performed by passive socialbots with no company associations as friends.
In our second study, we developed a general algorithm for reaching specific OSN users who declared themselves to be employees of targeted organizations, using the topologies of organizational social networks and utilizing socialbots. We evaluated the proposed method on targeted users from three actual organizations on Facebook, and two actual organizations on the Xing OSN (another popular OSN platform). Eventually, our socialbots were able to reach specific users with a success rate of up to 70% on Facebook, and up to 60% on Xing.
We quantify a social organization's potentiality, that is its ability to attain different configurations. The organization is represented as a network in which nodes correspond to individuals and (multi-)edges to their multiple interactions. Attainable configurations are treated as realizations from a network ensemble. To encode interaction preferences between individuals, we choose the generalized hypergeometric ensemble of random graphs, which is described by a closed-form probability distribution. From this distribution we calculate Shannon entropy as a measure of potentiality. This allows …
The paper provides an understanding of social capital in organizations that are open membership multi-agent systems with an emphasis in our formulation on the dynamic network of social interaction that, in part, elucidate evolving structures and impromptu topologies of networks. This paper, therefore, models an open source project as an organizational network. It provides definitions of social capital for this organizational network and formulation of the mechanism to optimize the social capital for achieving its goal that is optimized productivity. A case study of an open source Apache-Hadoop…
Wrocław University of Science and Technology（弗罗茨瓦夫理工大学）
Formation of a hierarchy within an organization is a natural way of assigning the duties, delegating responsibilities and optimizing the flow of information. Only for the smallest companies the lack of the hierarchy, that is, a flat one, is possible. Yet, if they grow, the introduction of a hierarchy is inevitable. Most often, its existence results in different nature of the tasks and duties of its members located at various organizational levels or in distant parts of it. On the other hand, employees often send dozens of emails each day, and by doing so, and also by being engaged in other act…
Social networks seeded, crystallized and structured by large-scale social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram and WeChat exhibit complicated epistemic structures and dynamics that arise from the nature of interactive knowledge that users/participants possess, share and shape. What users know about what other users know, about what other users know they know, and so forth, plays an important role in channeling user behavior on the platform as well as the structuring and dynamics of the social network the platform engenders. We use a novel approach to character…
Attention to informal communication networks within public organizations has grown in recent decades. While research has documented the role of individual cognition and social structure in understanding information search in organizations, this article emphasizes the importance of formal hierarchy. We argue that the structural attributes of bureaucracies are too important to be neglected when modeling knowledge flows in public organizations. Empirically, we examine interpersonal information seeking patterns among 143 employees in a small city government, using exponential random graph modeling…
如今，为了促进员工之间的沟通和合作，许多公司已经采用了一种新的在线社交网络，称为“企业社交网络”（ESN）。ESN可以为员工提供各种专业服务，帮助他们处理日常工作问题。同时，公司的员工通常根据他们职位的相对等级被组织成不同的等级。公司内部的管理结构可以用组织结构图直观地勾勒出来，出于隐私和安全考虑，这通常是对公众保密的。本文研究了基于异构ESN的企业内部组织结构图识别的IOC（Inference of Organizational Chart）问题。IOC问题的解决具有很大的挑战性，因为为了保证企业的顺利运营，企业内部组织结构图需要满足一定的结构要求（关于其深度和宽度）。为了解决IOC问题，提出了一种新的无监督方法Create（ChArT RECovEr），该方法包括3个步骤：（1）将ESN用户划分为不同的社会阶层;（2）从管理者到下属的监督链接推理;（3）连续的社会阶层匹配以修剪冗余的监督链接。在真实世界的在线ESN数据集上进行的大量实验表明，Create可以很好地解决IOC问题。
The paper aims to present a new apparatus for managing of the information security of the digital economy with using of social networks. A general problem for optimization of the information security management for participants in the digital economy is formulated. The results obtained make it possible to develop a new class of programs for analysis and decision support in the field of information security and economic management. The development of this line of research will be especially important in the financial field.
Social networks have increasingly become important and popular in modern times. Moreover, the influence of social networks plays a vital role in various organizations including government organizations, academic research or corporate organizations. Therefore, how to strategize the optimal propagation strategy in social networks has also become more important. By increasing the precision of evaluating the propagation probability of social network, it can indirectly influence the investment of cost, manpower and time for information propagation to achieve the best return. This study proposes a n…
Social media has enabled users and organizations to obtain information about technology usage like software usage and even security feature usage. However, on the dark side it has also allowed an adversary to potentially exploit the users in a manner to either obtain information from them or influence them towards decisions that might have malicious settings or intents. While there have been substantial efforts into understanding how social influence affects one's likelihood to adopt a security technology, especially its correlation with the number of friends adopting the same technology, in t…
Weaker Coherence, Weaker Reciprocity: Comparing the Semantic and Social Organization of Moltbook and Reddit
Universidad de Buenos Aires, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales（布宜诺斯艾利斯大学，理学院）；Instituto de Física Interdisciplinaria y Aplicada (INFINA), CONICET – Universidad de Buenos Aires（跨学科与应用物理研究所 (INFINA)，阿根廷国家科学研究委员会 - 布宜诺斯艾利斯大学）；Instituto Balseiro, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo y Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica（巴尔塞罗研究所，门多萨国立大学与阿根廷国家原子能委员会）；Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET)（阿根廷国家科学研究委员会 (CONICET)）
The interaction patterns of employees in social and professional networks play an important role in the success of employees and organizations as a whole. However, in many fields there is a severe under-representation of minority groups; moreover, minority individuals may be segregated from the rest of the network or isolated from one another. While the problem of increasing the representation of minority groups in various fields has been well-studied, diver- sification in terms of numbers alone may not be sufficient: social relationships should also be considered. In this work, we consider th…
Organizational network analysis (ONA) is a method for studying interactions within formal organizations. The utility of ONA has grown substantially over the years as means to analyze the relationships developed within and between teams, departments, and other organizational units. The mapping and quantifying of these relationships have been shown to provide insight into the exchange of information and resources, the building of social capital, and the spread of culture within and between organizations. However, the ethical concerns regarding personally identifiable information (PII) that exist…
Resilience denotes the capacity of a system to withstand shocks and its ability to recover from them. We develop a framework to quantify the resilience of highly volatile, non-equilibrium social organizations, such as collectives or collaborating teams. It consists of four steps: (i) \emph{delimitation}, i.e., narrowing down the target systems, (ii) \emph{conceptualization}, .e., identifying how to approach social organizations, (iii) formal \emph{representation} using a combination of agent-based and network models, (iv) \emph{operationalization}, i.e. specifying measures and demonstrating ho…
Optimism about the Internet's potential to bring the world together has been tempered by concerns about its role in inflaming the 'culture wars'. Via mass selection into like-minded groups, online society may be becoming more fragmented and polarized, particularly with respect to partisan differences. However, our ability to measure the social makeup of online communities, and in turn understand the social organization of online platforms, is limited by the pseudonymous, unstructured, and large-scale nature of digital discussion. We develop a neural embedding methodology to quantify the positi…
