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Affiliate Faculty Talk
William Rand, Dave Levin - University of Maryland, College Park
Friday, September 25, 2015, 11:00 am-12:00 pm Calendar
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Abstract

William Rand:

Title: Using Big Data, Social Networks, and Agent-Based Modeling to Understand Information Diffusion

Abstract: With the increasing abundance of `digital footprints' left by human interactions in online environments, e.g., social media and app use, the ability to model such behavior has become increasingly possible. Many approaches have been proposed, however, most previous model frameworks are fairly restrictive, and often the models are not directly compared on a diverse collection of human behavior. We will explore a new modeling approach that enables the creation of models directly from data with no previous restrictions on the data. We will explore the application of this method to understanding information diffusion on social media. This work illustrates the power and usefulness of an individual-level approach to modeling and understanding large datasets.

 

Dave Levin:

Title: The Ugly Truth about Online Authentication

Abstract: Authentication—that is, being able to verify with whom one is communicating—is a critical component to secure communication, and is traditionally made possible by a public key infrastructure (PKI). A necessary primitive in any PKI is the ability for a certificate authority to verifiably revoke a certificate it has issued, and to disseminate these revocations to all users who may have cached the certificate. This process requires human action, and thus leads us to ask: are administrators doing what they must to ensure a secure web? In this talk, I will try to answer this question using results from measurement studies we performed across the one million most popular websites, and all of the major browsers.

This talk is organized by Jeff Foster