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