Rooting out the Rumor Culprit in Online Social Networks

Speaker:        Dr. Chee Wei TAN
                City University of Hong Kong

Title:          "Rooting out the Rumor Culprit in Online Social Networks"

Date:           Monday, 28 April 2014

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Lecture Theater F (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Understanding information spreading or epidemic evolution in a network is
one of the 2008 U.S. NAE Grand Challenges for Engineering. Detection and
identification of malicious information sources in a network, for example
a rumor spreading in an online social network, allows timely quarantine of
the spreading and to limit the damage caused. We study the network
inferewynce problem of rooting out a single rumor source in a network with
susceptible-infected (SI) spreading and various features such as suspect
characteristics and multiple observations etc. We leverage ideas from the
Polya's urn model in probability theory and graph theory to shed insight
into the structural behavior of spreading, detectability and statistical
inference performance (ISIT 2013, ACM SIGMETRICS 2014). We will conclude
the talk with insights on theory and algorithm extensions as well as the
practical development of network forensics and cyber security protocols
for online social networks.

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Biography:

Chee Wei Tan is an Assistant Professor at the City University of Hong
Kong. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. degree from Princeton University all
in Electrical Engineering. He was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the California
Institute of Technology (Caltech). His industrial experience includes
corporate research at Fraser Research Lab in Princeton and Qualcomm R&D in
San Diego. His research interests are in networks, inference in online
large data analytics, smart grid, mobile computing, optimization theory
and its applications. Dr. Tan was the recipient of the 2008 Princeton
University Wu Prize for Excellence and a 2011 IEEE Communications Society
Asia-Pacific Young Researcher Award. He was a selected participant at the
US National Academy of Engineering 2013 China-America Frontiers of
Engineering Symposium. He currently serves as a Chair of the IEEE
Information Theory Society Hong Kong Chapter and as an Editor of the IEEE
Transactions on Communications.