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INRIA-Rennes –

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.

 

Date: 2012-Sep-05     Time: 15:00:00     Room: Auditório INESC, Av. Duque de Ávila, 23

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