University of Pisa
Department of Computer Science
Final Report: PhD course in
Computer Science
November 2013 - October 2017
XXIX Cycle
Chairman Ph.D. course:
Prof. Priepaolo Degano
Ph.D. student:
Andrea De Salve
Supervisors:
Prof. Laura Ricci
Dr. Paolo Mori
Introduction
The activities undertaken during my PhD course at the Department of Com-puter Science of the University of Pisa involved the following three directions/areas: Teaching: Support activities required to assist professors and students during
Undergraduate program and Master program delivered by the Department of Computer Science of the University of Pisa.
Training: training activities scheduled by the Department of Computer Sci-ence, such as internal courses, seminars, and international school. Research: set of activities conducted for research purposes, such as research
projects, publication in conferences/workshops, articles in journals, review activities.
In the following sections I will describe the specific activities in each area and the corresponding goals or results achieved.
Teaching activities
During the reference period I performed a number of teaching tasks, including guest lectures, Lab Assignments and Tutoring, Open Desk Office hours, Assign-ments correction and Project correction, for the following courses:
Tutor Laboratorio di Programmazione di Reti A 2015/2016 (12 CFU) - Laura Triennale in Informatica - Prof. Laura Ricci - Università di Pisa - Dipar-timento di Informatica
Tutor Laboratorio di Programmazione di Reti B 2016/2017 (12 CFU) - Laura Triennale in Informatica - Prof. Alina Sirbu - Università di Pisa - Dipar-timento di Informatica
Guest lecture P2P System 2014/2015 (6 CFU) - Laura Magistrale in matica - Prof. Laura Ricci - Università di Pisa - Dipartimento di Infor-matica
I collaborated or supervised the activities performed by the following stu-dents during their Undergraduate thesis and Master thesis:
• Undergraduate
– Andrea Palazzo - Dinamicita’ in P2P Dunbar-based ego-networks – Claudio Biselli - La rete TOR: un framework per aumentare
anoni-mato e sicurezza in Internet
– Andrea Michienzi - Analisi di communità e di Affinità temporale in Reti Sociali
– Diego Giorgini - Group based content sharing: an analysis of some encryption techniques
– Andrea Lisi - Selezioni di repliche in online social network: un ap-proccio basato su availability prediction
– Matteo Di Petrillo - Allocazione di dati in Distributed Online Social Netorks: un approccio guidato da politiche di privacy e dal compor-tamento temporale degli utenti
– Lorenzo Cogotti - Social Graph: un’applicazione per l’aggreagzione di dati provenienti da reti sociali eterogenee
– Davide Laganà - Sviluppo di un plug-in browser per logging di dati di online social networks
• Master
– Francesco Pitto - Availability Based Persistence in reti sociali P2P – Marco Dondio - SocialCircles!: An application for the analysis of
user’s behaviour in Online Social Networks
– Alessio Caporale, Filippo Delfino - Privacy in DOSNs: un Approccio Basato su Controllo degli Accessi
Training activities
During the reference period I performed a number of training activities aimed to support my researches. These activities were selected from courses and sem-inars provided by both the Department of Computer Science and International Schools. Specifically, the following activities were conducted:
PhD Courses:
Web Mining and Social Network Analysis An basic course for the anal-ysis of complex networks, with a special focus on social networks and the Web - its structure and function, and how it can be exploited to search for information. The exam has the goal to evaluate the students understand-ing of the problems and the methods described in the course. Teacher: Dino Pedreschi, University of Pisa
Bayesian Machine Learning An preliminary course for Bayesian Reasoning and Machine Learning. Teacher: Guido Sanguinetti, University of Edin-burgh
Sensor Networks - Internet of things A course focused on sensor networks, internet of things and smart environments. In particular the course intro-duces the wireless sensors, their issues and requirements. Teacher: Michele Girolami (CNR), Alexander Kocian (Dipartimento di Informatica), Ste-fano Chessa (Dipartimento di Informatica)
PhD Schools:
Bertinoro International Spring School (BISS 2014) An annual school of-fering three graduate-level courses aimed at first-year PhD students in Computer Science. In addition to introducing students to timely research topics, the school is meant to promote acquaintance and collaboration among young European researchers. The 2014 edition of the school of-fered 3 courses each consisting of 13 hours of lectures:
Big Data Analysis of Patterns in Media Content The course fo-cuses on patterns in data, data-driven artificial intelligence, the structure of the EU mediasphere, mining the contents of Twitter, analysis of the 2012 US elections, machine translation and big data, big-data in biology, modeling readers preferences, and ethical and epistemological implications of large scale pattern analysis.
An Introduction to Probabilistic and Quantum Programming The course introduces the basics of probabilistic and quantum algorithms and give a survey of recently introduced probabilistic and quantum pro-gramming languages, in the meantime trying to understand the issues these rather peculiar forms of programming raise.
Development of dynamically evolving and self-adaptive software The couse focusing on the real-world requirements that lead to self-adaptive systems and then discuss how reflective capabilities can be designed to support self-adaptive capabilities.
International school on social networks security, privacy and trust The SNSPT 2016 school aims at bringing together members from the interna-tional security research community to debate contemporary issues in the area of privacy, security and trust in Social Networks. The school consists of lectures given by world-leading researchers in this area (see the list of our prestigious speakers below) and of a PhD forum. The school is orga-nized in conjunction by the University of Padua – SPRITZ Security and Privacy Research Group and the National Research Council (CNR) – IIT.
Seminars:
PhD Mauriana Pesaresi seminars A cycle of seminars, dedicated to the memory of our friend and colleague Mauriana Pesaresi, aimed at bringing together the students, researchers and professors in our and other depart-ments to discuss their work.
Algorithms for genomic data analysis The course has the goal to give an overview of algorithmic methods that have been conceived for the analy-sis of genomic sequences. The exam has the goal to evaluate the students understanding of the problems and the methods described in the course. Moreover, the exam is additionally meant as a chance to learn how a scientific paper is like, and how to make an oral presentation on scien-tific/technical topics, that is designed for a specific audience.
Factory seminars fACTORY (A Cycle of Talks on Research in industrY) sem-inars are aimed at discussing how research is done in leading computer science industries. Namely, invited speakers will illustrate how research is performed inside their company (motivation, business goals, procedures, business value, ...) so as to compare this with the basic research performed in the academy.
PHD+ The program of the University of Pisa aimed at promoting and encour-aging the entrepreneurial spirit and innovation among master students, doctoral students, research doctors and professors. It consists of a series of seminars, which include coaching and mentoring activities on business projects led by international experts in the field of innovation and tech-nology.
Research activities
The main subjects of my research activities are related to both Online Social Networks and Distributed Network Systems. Nowadays Online Social Networks become a fundamental tool of our daily lives and covers a large portion of the time that a user spends on the WWW. The whole period was characterized by several research activities which focused on privacy protection in Decentralized Online Social Networks. I analyzed the adopted solutions to support users when defining privacy preferences in terms of the provided security, expressiveness and flexibility. Based on this, I proposed a new privacy-preserving framework that enables users to define flexible privacy policies with different levels of granularity based on different aspects (or attributes) derived from the OSN knowledge. The privacy policies are used both to regulate the access to shared contents in DOSNs and to select the replica peers on which the content could be replicated. The study conducted on the topics contributes to the following publications: In international journals
• Andrea De Salve, Barbara Guidi, Tobias Amft, Kalman Graffi, and Laura Ricci. Didusonet: A p2p architecture for distributed dunbar-based social networks. Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications, pages 1–18, 2015 • Andrea De Salve, Marco Dondio, Barbara Guidi, and Laura Ricci. The
impact of user’s availability on on-line ego networks: a facebook analysis. Computer Communications, 73:211–218, 2016
• Andrea De Salve, Barbara Guidi, and Laura Ricci. Evaluation of structural and temporal properties of ego networks for data availability in dosns. Mobile Networks and Applications, pages 1–12, 2017
• Andrea De Salve, Roberto Di Pietro, Paolo Mori, and Laura Ricci. A logical key hierarchy based approach to preserve content privacy in de-centralized online social networks. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2017
• Andrea De Salve and Patrick Mukala. Probabilistic Modeling of Infor-mation Diffusion in Online Social Networks (OSN): An Empirical Study. International Journal of Information and Network Security (IJINS 2014), 3(5)
In international conferences
• Marco Conti, Andrea De Salve, Barbara Guidi, Francesco Pitto, and Laura Ricci. Trusted Dynamic Storage for Dunbar-Based P2P Online Social
Networks. In On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2014 Conferences, pages 400–417. Springer, 2014
• Andrea De Salve, Barbara Guidi, and Laura Ricci. A data aggregation strategy based on wavelet for the internet of things. In 19th International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Comput-ing, 2017
• Andrea De Salve, Paolo Mori, and Laura Ricci. A privacy-aware framework for decentralized online social networks. In Database and Expert Systems Applications, pages 479–490. Springer, 2015
• Andrea De Salve, Roberto Di Pietro, Paolo Mori, and Laura Ricci. Logical key hierarchy for groups management in distributed online social network. In Computers and Communication (ISCC), 2016 IEEE Symposium on, pages 710–717. IEEE, 2016
• Andrea De Salve, Barbara Guidi, Paolo Mori, and Laura Ricci. Distributed coverage of ego networks in f2f online social networks. In Ubiquitous Intel-ligence & Computing, Advanced and Trusted Computing, Scalable Com-puting and Communications, Cloud and Big Data ComCom-puting, Internet of People, and Smart World Congress, 2016 Int. IEEE Conferences, pages 423–431. IEEE, 2016
• Andrea De Salve, Paolo Mori, Laura Ricci, Raed Al-Aaridhi, and Kalman Graffi. Privacy-preserving data allocation in decentralized online social networks. In Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems, pages 47–60. Springer, 2016
• Andrea De Salve, Barbara Guidi, and Laura Ricci. An analysis of ego network communities and temporal affinity for online social networks. In Smart Objects and Technologies for Social Good, Venice November - 2016, 2nd EAI International Conference on. Springer, 2016
• Andrea De Salve, Barbara Guidi, Paolo Mori, Laura Ricci, and Vincenzo Ambriola. Privacy and temporal aware allocation of data in decentralized online social networks. In Green, Pervasive and Cloud Computing, Amalfi Coast, Italy, The 12th International Conference on. Springer, 2017 In international workshop
• Marco Conti, Andrea De Salve, Barbara Guidi, and Laura Ricci. Epi-demic Diffusion of Social Updates in Dunbar Based DOSN. In On Sec-ond Workshop on Large Scale Distributed Virtual Environments on Clouds and P2P, LSDVE 2014, Euro-Par 2014: Parallel Processing - 20th Inter-national Conference, Porto, Portugal, August 25-29 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 8632, page 828, 2014
• Andrea De Salve, Paolo Mori, and Laura Ricci. Evaluating the impact of friends in predicting user’s availability in online social networks. In 1st In-ternational Workshop on Personal Analytics and Privacy (In conjunction with ECML PKDD 2017), 2017
Technical report
• Andrea De Salve, Paolo Mori, and Laura Ricci. Comparison of the privacy controls for group communication in decentralized online social networks. Technical Report - University of Pisa - Department of Computer Science, 2017
Submitted papers
• Andrea De Salve, Paolo Mori, and Laura Ricci. A survey on privacy in decentralized online social networks. Computer Science Review Journal, 2017. Under review
• Andrea De Salve, Barbara Guidi, and Paolo Mori. Predicting the availabil-ity of users devices in decentralized online social networks. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 2017. Under second round of revisions
I spent 3 months (from 01/07/2015 to 30/10/2015) as a visitor at the Tech-nology of Social Networks Lab, Heinrich Heine University - Dusseldorf.
Finally, I am in the Technical Program Committee and Organizing Program Committee of the 3rd EAI International Conference on Smart Objects and Tech-nologies for Social Good.
