SignalGeneriX receives the Best Paper Award at the International Symposium

The scientific publication titled “Early Malicious Activity Discovery in Microblogs by Social Bridges Detection” received the Best Paper Award at the 16th International Symposium on Signal Processing and Information Technology (ISSPIT’2016) that took place on December 12th-14th in Limassol. The research work was conducted with the collaboration of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH) and company SignalGeneriX Ltd (SG), while the authors are PhD Candidate at AUTH and Marie Curie Fellow, Ms. Antonia Gogoglou, researcher at SG, Dr. Zenona Theodosiou, CEO at SG, Dr. Anastasis Kounoudes and professors at AUTH, Dr. Athena Vakali and Dr. Yannis Manolopoulos.

In the context of this work an innovative framework was introduced for the protection of underage social media users. Taking into account the particular needs of vulnerable users a new category of dangerous social media users was detected and was described with the term “social bridges”, meaning the intermediate links between malicious and vulnerable users. With extensive experimentation using graph analysis and complex network degeneration it was found that the “social bridges” are highly influential users in a network and are utilized by malicious users to invade the large pool of honest ones. The framework was successfully tested on a large dataset containing more than 300,000 users and 1,000,000 links and can be employed for the protection of underage users from potential dangers in their extensive network of connections. This work was performed as part of the research project ENCASE funded by the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skodowska-Curie grant agreement No 691025.

The goal of the project is to utilize state of the art technology for designing and implementing a browser based architecture that will provide protection to underage users of Online Social Networks from various malicious behaviors. Coordinator of the project is the Cyprus University of Technology and other participants in the consortium include: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), University College London (UK), Università degli Studi Roma Tre (Italy), Telefonica Investigacion y Desarrollo (Spain), Innovators S.A (Greece), CY.R.I.C Cyprus Research and Innovation Center Ltd (Cyprus) and SignalGeneriX Ltd (Cyprus).