WhatsUp : a P2P instant news items recommender
Dr. Anne-Marie Kermarrec,
INRIA Senior Researcher (Directrice de recherche), INRIA-Rennes, FRANCE –
Abstract:
WhatsUp is an instant news system aimed for a large scale network with no central bottleneck, single point of failure or censorship authority. Users express their opinions about the news items they receive by operating a like-dislike button. WhatsUp’s collaborative filtering scheme leverages these opinions to dynamically maintain an implicit social network and ensures that users subsequently receive news that are likely to match their interests. Users with similar tastes are clustered using a similarity metric reflecting long-standing and emerging (dis)interests without revealing their profile to other users. News items are disseminated through a heterogeneous epidemic protocol that (a) biases the choice of the targets towards those with similar interests and (b) amplifies the dissemination based on the interest of every actual news item. The push and asymmetric nature of the network created by WhatsUp provides a natural support to limit privacy breaches. The evaluation of through large-scale simulations, a ModelNet emulation on a cluster and a PlanetLab deployment on real traces collected both from Digg as well as from a real survey, show that WhatsUp provides an efficient tradeoff between accuracy and completeness.
Bio
Before joining INRIA in February 2004, Anne-Marie Kermarrec was with Microsoft Research in Cambridge as a Researcher since March 2000. Before that, she obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Rennes (FRANCE) in October 1996 (thesis). She also spent one year (1996-1997) in the Computer Systems group of Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) in collaboration with Maarten van Steen and Andrew. S. Tanenbaum and was Assistant Professor at the University of Rennes 1 from 1998 to 2000. She defended her “habilitation à diriger les recherches” in December 2002 on large-scale application-level multicast. Anne-Marie Kermarrec’ s research interests include: Peer to peer distributed systems, epidemic algorithms, content-based search in large-scale overlay networks, collaborative storage systems, search, collaborative filtering, social networks, Web Science. She was awarded an ERC Starting Grant (GOSSPLE 2008-2013) to work on these topics.
Host
Luís Eduardo Teixeira Rodrigues
Venue:
Anfitearo Ávila
Upcoming Events
INESC Brussels HUB Winter Meeting 2023

This edition of the HUB Winter Meeting will be co-organised with Science Business and will take place on the 30 and 31 January, in Lisbon, at Instituto Superior Técnico, Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
Please see below a summary of the agenda, this will be updated on the INESC Brussels HUB website regularly (confirmed speakers and other relevant info). Places for onsite participation are limited so registration is mandatory. Online participants will be sent a ZOOM link for each specific session on the 27th January.
INESC Brussels HUB website: https://hub.inesc.pt/
Monday, 30 January
a) Digital Europe Programme & Chips Act: state of play and possibilities for INESC.
9h to 10h30 GMT
(Exclusive for INESC researchers and administrators).
b) Science Business: how can INESC tap into Science Business network, activities and communications tools.
(Exclusive for INESC researchers and administrators).
c) Networking Lunch (for all onsite participants).
d) Roundtable: From rhetoric to reality – Embedding international strategy in the DNA of research organisations.
(Closed-door, roundtable workshop, Chatham House rules, open to INESC researchers and administrators, external participants by invitation only).
e) Networking Dinner
(By invitation only – INESC researchers participating onsite in the event are elegible to join).
Tuesday, 31 January
f) Workshop: How they did it? Strategic positioning for structural success in Horizon Europe: a discussion of best practices.
(Exclusive for INESC researchers, administrators and international invited speakers).
g) The public consultation on European R&I Programmes: Towards FP10.
(Closed-door, roundtable workshop, Chatham House rules, open to INESC researchers and administrators, external participants by invitation only).
h) Networking Lunch (for all onsite participants).
i) Management Committee meeting (Directors and POB members)
The HUB Winter Meeting aims at bringing together researchers and administrators from the 5 INESC institutes, affiliated higher education institutions in Portugal and abroad, with key European and global players, to:
– Discuss key research and innovation issues at EU level.
– Inform institutional policy and strategy.
– Exchange best-practices about R&I management, career development and policy positioning.
– Promote, discuss and deliver vision, visibility, networking and impactful communication.
– Create, identify and deepen partnerships and collaboration opportunities for collaborative R&I.