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Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from Bitcoin

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments
Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from Bitcoin Ben-Sasson et al., 2014 Yesterday we saw that de-anonymising techniques can learn a lot about the true identities of participants in Bitcoin transactions. Ben-Sasson et al. point out that given this, Bitcoin could be considered significantly less private than traditional schemes: While users may employ many identities (or pseudonyms) ... Continue Reading

A fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing payments among men with no names

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 13 Comments
A fistful of bitcoins: characterizing payments among men with no names Meiklejohn et al., USENIX ;login: 2013 This week we're going to be looking at the five papers from the ACM Queue Research for Practice selections on 'Cryptocurrencies, Blockchains, and Smart Contracts.' These papers are chosen by Arvind Narayanan and Andrew Miller, co-authors of the ... Continue Reading

Online actions with offline impact: how online social networks influence online and offline social behavior

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments
Online actions with offline impact: how online social networks influence online and offline user behavior Althoff et al., WSDM 2017 You can go to a lot of effort to build social networking features or support into your app or website. If the goal is engagement directly within the app then at least you have something ... Continue Reading

Beyond the words: predicting user personality from heterogeneous information

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments
Beyond the words: predicting user personality from heterogeneous information Wei et al., WSDM 2017 Here's a very topical paper! You may have seen the recent Motherboard piece, "The data that turned the world upside down," describing how personality profiling was used to provide tailored messages to voters in the recent American elections. In the interest ... Continue Reading

Reducing controversy by connecting opposing views

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments
Reducing controversy by connecting opposing views Garimella et al., WSDM 2017 Society is often polarized by controversial issues that split the population into groups with opposing views. When such issues emerge on social media, we often observe the creation of ‘echo chambers’, i.e., situations where like-minded people reinforce each other’s opinion, but do not get ... Continue Reading