- October, 04/10/2018 – 05/10/2018
On October 04-05/10/2018 the ENCASE consortium met at TID’s premises in Barcelona for the 1st ENCASE Technical meeting. - May, 03/05/2017 ”“ 05/05/2017
On the Detection of Images Containing Child-Pornographic Material by Emilios Yiallourou, Rafaella Demetriou and Andreas Lanitis. The vast increase in the use of social networks and other internet-based communication tools contributed to the escalation of the problem of exchanging child pornographic material over the internet. The problem of dissemination of child pornographic material could be addressed using dedicated image detection algorithms capable of rating the inappropriateness level of images exchanged through computer networks so that images with inappropriate content involving children are blocked. However, the complexity of the image detection task coupled with the nonexistence of suitable datasets, inhibit the development of efficient algorithms that can be used for detecting offensive images containing children. To deal with the problem, we propose a methodological approach that can be used for supporting the development of child pornography detectors through the generation of synthetic datasets and through the decomposition of the task into a set of simpler tasks for which training data is available. Preliminary results show the promise of the proposed approach. More information can be found here: http://ict-2017.org - April, 21/04/2017:
On April 21st, 2017 the first Review of ENCASE took successfully place at the Università Degli Studi Roma TRE ”“ Italy. - April, 19/04/2017 ”“ 20/04/2017:
On April 19 and 20, 2017 the second ENCASE Plenary Meeting of ENCASE took successfully place, at the Università Degli Studi Roma TRE ”“ Italy.
- April, 11/04/2017
We are pleased to announce that the ENCASE research project has been included in the National Strategy actions for Security on the Internet relating to the creative and safe use of the internet. The aim is to present and make known the actions of the ENCASE programme as well as to provide an opportunity for information sharing and at the same time create opportunities for partnerships and synergies between those involved in safety issues on the Internet. The concept of the effective and creative use of the Internet with security, responsibility and creativity is one of the primary goals of the Republic of Cyprus.The optimal exploitation of the potentials provided by the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) in order to promote innovation, financial growth and progress is promoted by the Digital Agenda presented in the European Commission in May 19th, 2010.The Republic of Cyprus is following the European and international standards in this respect, with the recent approval of the National Strategy on Cybersecurity for the Republic of Cyprus by the Ministry Council (Ref. Decision 74.721, Date of Decision 14/02/13, Date of Assignment 27 / 3/13) under the coordination of the Office of the Commissioner of Electronic Communications and Postal Services (OCECPR). In this context, the Ministry of Education and Culture has accepted the invitation to coordinate the Working Group on the Safe Internet for children, teachers and parents.The national strategy proposal aims to provide information and education on digital security issues, which will be addressed to children, teachers and parents in order to become critical and responsible users of digital technologies and develop culture of safe use of the possibilities of digital technologies.For more information, please visit the link: http://www.esafecyprus.ac.cy/parousiasi-drasewn - March, 17/03/2017
Mean Birds: Detecting Aggression and Bullying on Twitter by Despoina Chatzakou, Nicolas Kourtellis, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Gianluca Stringhini, and Athina Vakali.Over the past few years, bullying and aggression of Internet users have grown on social media platforms, prompting serious consequences to victims of all ages. Recent cyberbully-ing incidents have even led to teenage suicides, prompted by prolonged and/or coordinated digital harassment. Although this issue affects as many as half of young social media users, tools and technologies for understanding and mitigating it are scarce and mostly ineffective. In this paper, we present a principled and scalable approach to detect bullying and aggressive behavior on Twitter. We propose a robust methodology for extracting text, user, and network-based attributes from a corpus of 1.6M tweets posted over 3 months. We study the properties of cyberbullies and aggressors and what features distinguish them from regular users, alongside crowdsourced labeling provided by human annotators. Finally, we use machine learning classification algorithms to detect users exhibiting bullying and aggressive behavior, achieving over 90% AUCROC. More information can be found here: - February, 24/02/2017
Measuring #GamerGate: A Tale of Hate, Sexism, and Bullying by Emiliano De Cristofaro, Despoina Chatzakou, Jeremy Bluckburn, Nicolas Kourtellis, Athina Vakali, Gianluca Stringhini has been accepted for presentation at Cybersafety Workshop 2017. Over the past few years, online aggression and abusive behaviors have occurred in many different forms and on a variety of platforms. In extreme cases, these incidents have evolved into hate, discrimination, and bullying, and even materialized into real-world threats and attacks against individuals or groups. In this paper, we study the Gamergate controversy. Started in August 2014 in the online gaming world, it quickly spread across various social networking platforms, ultimately leading to many incidents of cyberbullying and cyberaggression. We focus on Twitter, presenting a measurement study of a dataset of 340k unique users and 1.6M tweets to study the properties of these users, the content they post, and how they differ from random Twitter users. We find that users involved in this “Twitter war” tend to have more friends and followers, are generally more engaged and post tweets with negative sentiment, less joy, and more hate than random users. We also perform preliminary measurements on how the Twitter suspension mechanism deals with such abusive behaviors. While we focus on Gamergate, our methodology to collect and analyze tweets related to aggressive and bullying activities is of independent interest. More information can be found here: - December, 17/12/2016
E-safety in Web 2.0 learning environments: a research synthesis and implications for researchers and practitioners by Antigoni Parmaxi, Kostantinos Papadamou, Michael Sirivianos and Makis Stamatellatos has been accepted for presentation at HCI International 2017 and for publication in the Conference Proceedings. The Conference Proceedings will be published by Springer in a multi-volume set. Papers will appear in volumes of the LNCS and LNAI series, indexed by ISI Citation Index, EI Engineering Index, ACM Digital Library, etc. All Conference participants will receive in their registration bags the Conference Proceedings in electronic format. This study explores the research development pertaining to safety and security in online collaborative learning environments, as well as a review of web-based tools and applications that attempt to address security and privacy issues in Online Social Networks. Published research manuscripts related to safety and security in collaborative learning environments have been explored, and the research topics with which researchers and practitioners deal with are discussed, as well as implications for researchers and practitioners. This paper argues that online learning environments entail threats and challenges in the safety of both students and instructors, and further research needs to take place for handling and protecting the privacy of all involved stakeholders. - December, 16/12/2016
Early Malicious Activity Discovery in Microblogs by Social Bridges Detection by Gogoglou Antonia, Theodosiou Zenonas, Kounoudes Tasos, Vakali Athena and Manolopoulos Yannis has been accepted for publication at the 16th International Symposium on Signal Processing and Information Technology (ISSPIT2016) and will be soon available via IEEExplore. This work was completed for the purposes of H2020 project ENCASE, that aims to protect youngsters in Online Social Networks and the Web in general. The current publication proposes a framework to detect potentially malicious users in Twitter and defines the concept of “social bridges”, meaning the influential users that are utilized by the malicious ones to help penetrate the large component of an OSN. A topology based classification model was introduced to allow for early detection of any dangerous new connection of underage Twitter users. In addition this work is motivated by the strong need to safeguard youngsters OSNs experience such that they can be empowered and aware. The topology of a graph is studied towards detecting the so called social bridges, i.e. the major supporters of malicious users, who have links and ties to both honest and malicious user communities. A graph-topology based classification scheme is proposed to detect such bridge linkages which are suspicious for threatening youngsters networking. More information can be found here: - November, 20/11/2016
“Cyprus University of Technology (CUT)informs you that Oracle, one of the world”s largest software companies, will be visiting CUT on Thursday, December 1st. With more than 400,000 customers in more than 145 countries around the globe, and with deployments across a wide variety of industries, Oracle offers an optimized and fully integrated stack of business hardware and software, allowing its customers to build the best infrastructure for their enterprise.A talk that describes the limitless employment and career development opportunities at Oracle; both in Cyprus and globally.
Ӣ Why work at Oracle.
”¢ Introduction to the Oracle Cloud Platform ”“ Transformational opportunities.
Ӣ Digital transformation leveraging Oracle Big Data.
”¢ Cloud Integration Strategies using Oracle PaaS.”More information can be found here:
https://www.cut.ac.cy/news/article/?contentId=124370 - November, 16/11/2016
Bentham”s Gaze is a blog written by Information Security researchers in University College London. The authors have written a more explanatory version in Bentham based on the original article in The Conversation, written by Emiliano De Cristofaro, UCL.
More information can be found here: https://www.benthamsgaze.org/2016/11/16/a-longitudinal-measurement-study-of-4chans-politically-incorrect-forum-and-its-effect-on-the-web/ - November, 14/11/2016
A multi-layer software architecture framework for adaptive real-time analytics. REALICS is motivated by the fact that the demand for aggregating current and past big data streams requiresnew software methodologies, platforms and services. The proposed framework is designed to tackle with data intensive problems in real time environments, via services built dynamically undera fully scalable and elastic Lambda based architecture. REALICS proposes a multi-layer software platform, based on the lambda architecture paradigm, for aggregating and synchronizing real time and batch processing. The proposed software layers and adaptive components support quality of experience along with community driven software development.
More information can be found here: - October, 06/10/2016 ”“ 07/10/2016:
The first Plenary Meeting of ENCASE took successfully place, at the Salonica ”“ AUTH Campus at Kalamaria ”“ Greece. - August, 31/08/2015:
“The interdisciplinary Social Computing Research Center of the Cyprus University of Technology (http://socialcomputing.eu/ at CUT) coordinates a new research project under the “Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action Research and Innovation Staff Exchanges” of HORIZON2020. The project entitled Enhancing security and privacy in the social web: a user-centered approach for the protection of minors (ENCASE) received excellent rating through a long and competitive evaluation process”. An announcment about the ENCASE project under CUT’s coordination. More information can be found here:
http://socialcomputing.eu/
