Who?
Name: Arnaud Legout
Mail: arnaud.legout@inria.fr
Telephone: 04 92 38 78 15
Web page: http://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Arnaud.Legout/
Where?
Place of the project: Inria
Address: 2004 route des Lucioles, Sophia Antipolis
Team: DIANA
Web page: https://team.inria.fr/diana/
What?
Title: Exploring chain of trust on Twitter
Pre-requisites if needed: fluent in at least one programming language
Description:
Twitter is the most popular micro-blogging service in the world. It
allows its users to exchange short messages (tweets) that are limited
to 140 characters. It was created to enable people to find out what is
currently happening with people and organizations they are interested
in. The relation between users on Twitter is different from classical
social networks like Facebook. Instead of bidirectional friendship
link that are initiated by one user and accepted by another, Twitter
uses the concept of following. Users can follow other users they are
interested in, which means they subscribe for all the messages they
sent. So, the links on Twitter are unidirectional, if someone follows
you, you don't need to follow back. Twitter is a very interesting
object of study because the unidirectional model of relationship is
the closest to real-life communications, thus a huge societal impact.
The goal of this internship is to study how to influence users on
Twitter by exploiting a transitive relationship called chain of
trust. The student will have the opportunity to work on a unique datasets
we collected in 2012 [1]. This dataset represents the entire Twitter
social graph with more than 500 million accounts and 24 billion
links. We propose to explore how social links are created and how this
knowledge can be exploited by a malicious user to infringe privacy and
influence information propagation.
This internship is research oriented and can be continued with
a Ph.D. thesis for excellent students.
[1] http://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Arnaud.Legout/Projects/sotweet.html