Internship List 2014-2015

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