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Most privacy-conscious users utilize HTTPS and an anonymity network such as Tor to mask source and destination IP addresses. It has been shown that encrypted and anonymized network traffic traces can still leak information through a type of attack called a website fingerprinting (WF) attack. The adversary records the network traffic and is only able to observe the number of incoming and outgoing messages, the size of each message, and the time difference between messages. In previous work, the effectiveness of website fingerprinting has been shown to have an accuracy of over 90% when using Tor as the anonymity network. Thus, an Internet Service Provider can successfully identify the websites its users are visiting. One main concern about website fingerprinting is its practicality. The common assumption in most previous work is that a victim is visiting one website at a time and has access to the complete network trace of that website. However, this is not realistic. We propose two new algorithms to deal with situations when the victim visits one website after another (continuous visits) and visits another website in the middle of visiting one website (overlapping visits). We show that our algorithm gives an accuracy of 80% (compared to 63% in a previous work [24]) in finding the split point which is the start point for the second website in a trace. Using our proposed “splitting” algorithm, websites can be predicted with an accuracy of 70%. When two website visits are overlapping, the website fingerprinting accuracy falls dramatically. Using our proposed “sectioning” algorithm, the accuracy for predicting the website in overlapping visits improves from 22.80% to 70%. When part of the network trace is missing (either the beginning or the end), the accuracy when using our sectioning algorithm increases from 20% to over 60%. 

Determination of quality and reliability of information found in social media have been subjects of study by sever researchers. One set of solution may not work in all cases. This paper presents a method to estimate the slant of tweets related to a topic. The general approach followed is to construct labeled data from tweets and use supervised learning to build predictive models. Results obtained from two datasets are compared against OTC model and a CNN based model. 

Searching for relevant literature is a fundamental part of academic research. The search for relevant literature is becoming a more difficult and time-consuming task as millions of articles are published each year. As a solution, recommendation systems for academic papers attempt to help researchers find relevant papers quickly. This paper focuses on graph-based recommendation systems for academic papers using citation networks. This type of paper recommendation system leverages a graph of papers linked by citations to create a list of relevant papers. In this study, we explore recommendation systems for academic papers using citation networks incorporating citation relations. We define citation relation based on the number of times the origin paper cites the reference paper, and use this citation relation to measure the strength of the relation between the papers. We created a weighted network using citation relation as citation weight on edges. We evaluate our proposed method on a real-world publication data set, and conduct an extensive comparison with three state-of-the-art baseline methods. Our results show that citation network-based recommendation systems using citation weights perform better than the current methods. 

The researchers in this study have developed a novel approach using mutual reinforcement learning (MRL) where both the robot and human act as empathetic individuals who function as reinforcement learning agents for each other to achieve a particular task over continuous communication and feedback. This shared model not only has a collective impact but improves human cognition and helps in building a successful human-robot relationship. In our current work, we compared our learned reinforcement model with a baseline non-reinforcement and random approach in a robotics domain to identify the significance and impact of MRL. MRL contributed to improved skill transfer, and the robot was able successfully to predict which reinforcement behaviors would be most valuable to its human partners. 

In this paper, we propose and apply a method to analyze the activeness of an event based on related tweets. The method characterizes and measures activeness of an event by a set of indicators. The indicators proposed in this paper are original tweet count, retweet count, follower count, positive sentiment, negative sentiment, daily change in users count, and sparseness of user community. We present procedures to compute the last two indicators. All indicators collectively are used to determine the activeness of an event. This approach is used to analyze the Syrian-refugee-crisis-related tweets. Its generality is demonstrated by applying it to analyze “immigration”-related tweets.