Third Party Tracking in the Mobile Ecosystem

A paper by Reuben Binns, Ulrik Lyngs, Max Van Kleek, Jun Zhao, Timothy Libert and Nigel Shadbolt on third-party tracking, which is the identification and tracking of users and their behaviour across multiple digital services.

The paper presents the findings of an empirical study of third-party trackers on almost a million apps from the US and UK Google Play stores, one of the biggest studies of its kind.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.03603.pdf

Ewya: An Interoperable Fog Computing Infrastructure with RDF Stream Processing

A paper by Eugene Siow, Thanassis Tiropanis and Wendy Hall on a new Fog Computing infrastructure called Ewya.

Fog computing is an emerging technology which is an extension to Cloud Computing. It allows processing and data storage to be distributed around a network efficiently.

The authors describe the details and architecture of the technology and present the results of an evaluation of its performance.

https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/412749/1/eywa.pdf

Nigel Shadbolt elected Fellow of the Royal Society

Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. More details can be found here.

In addition to his knighthood and professorship, his many other achievements and appointments include being Chairman and Co-Founder of the UK Open Data Institute, being adviser to the UK government on Open Data, undertaking a number of reviews for the UK Government and being Principal of Jesus College, Oxford.

Is social media changing democracy? A talk by Wendy Hall

A video recording of a talk given by Professor Dame Wendy Hall on the relationship between politics and social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

She discusses the situation on the eve of the UK referendum on whether to leave the European Union, in which most of the opinion polls were either too close to call or narrowly pointing to a remain vote, but that analysis of social media on the eve of the referendum pointed to a leave result.

This talk took place on the eve of the 2016 US presidential elections. Professor Hall talks about how, similarly to the UK referendum, in contrast to opinion polls, analysis of social media points to a Trump victory……………..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9mGKcpIXfs&feature=youtu.be