Computing Reviews
Today's Issue Hot Topics Search Browse Recommended My Account Log In
Review Help
Search
Mining social networks and security informatics
Özyer T., Erdem Z., Rokne J., Khoury S., Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated, New York, NY, 2013. 275 pp. Type: Book (978-9-400763-58-6)
Date Reviewed: Apr 7 2014

As one would expect, social networks and information security are hot topics to which some researchers want to contribute, sometimes hastily, largely ignoring prior work that has been done in communications network traffic analysis, monitoring, and security. At the same time, the specifics of social networks may trigger some interesting ideas or challenges, such as those linked more clearly to evolving content creation, the faster dynamics of users, and often-compromised privacy.

This edited volume, in Springer’s new series called “Lecture Notes in Social Networks,” is an unstructured collection of 14 individual papers on miscellaneous specialized topics. The only things they have in common are a set of core considerations around social network analysis and metrics, graph properties, and ad hoc statistics, with case studies in some of the papers. The volume has no introduction or foreword, no sections, no index, no table of authors, and no common reference list; papers with related topics do not follow each other; and the internal paper structures have no coherence. A few of the papers bring up interesting issues, but stay at a discussion level instead of contributing to solutions, largely because the issues are very difficult: actor identification, the importance of terrorists in a terror network, and scrapping outlier data in data mining.

A few of the papers identify novel issues and offer useful approaches to them, especially those on the construction of uncertain social networks from unstructured textual data, analyzing privacy breaks in social networks, and comparing metrics for clustering into communities. This set of papers is by far the most valuable in this volume. Most of the other papers deal with well-studied areas, or very peculiar ones with limited applicability. By its structure, this volume offers little added educational or research value to the individual papers. I hope that the authors of the best papers can find a way to have later versions included in more important archives or journals.

Reviewer:  Prof. L.-F. Pau, CBS Review #: CR142143 (1406-0407)
Bookmark and Share
  Reviewer Selected
 
 
Data Mining (H.2.8 ... )
 
 
Network Communications (C.2.1 ... )
 
 
Security, Integrity, And Protection (H.2.0 ... )
 
 
Social Networking (H.3.4 ... )
 
Would you recommend this review?
yes
no
Other reviews under "Data Mining": Date
Feature selection and effective classifiers
Deogun J. (ed), Choubey S., Raghavan V. (ed), Sever H. (ed) Journal of the American Society for Information Science 49(5): 423-434, 1998. Type: Article
May 1 1999
Rule induction with extension matrices
Wu X. (ed) Journal of the American Society for Information Science 49(5): 435-454, 1998. Type: Article
Jul 1 1998
Predictive data mining
Weiss S., Indurkhya N., Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1998. Type: Book (9781558604032)
Feb 1 1999
more...

E-Mail This Printer-Friendly
Send Your Comments
Contact Us
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.   Copyright 1999-2024 ThinkLoud®
Terms of Use
| Privacy Policy