Social technologies including blogs, wikis, social bookmarking sites, photo sharing, video sharing and social networking sites (SNS) have been widely used to facilitate online social networking (OSN). We define OSN as a range of activities enabled by online social technologies and operationalised by a group of people. OSN is widely popular for non-educational purposes among students. However, O...

Online Social Networks (OSN) have enriched the social lives of millions of users. Discovering new friends in the social network is valuable both for the user and for the health of OSN since users with more friends engage longer and more often with the site. The simplest way to formalize friendship recommendation is to cast the problem as a link prediction problem in the social graph. In this wo...

There are some critical privacy concerns in the current online social networks (OSNs). Users' information is disclosed to different entities that they were not supposed to access. Furthermore, the notion of friendship is inadequate in OSNs since the degree of social relationships between users dynamically changes over the time. Additionally, users may define similar privacy settings for their f...

Online social networks (OSN) like Twitter or Facebook are popular and powerful since they allow reaching millions of users online. They are also a popular target for socialbot attacks. Without a deep understanding of the impact of such attacks, the potential of online social networks as an instrument for facilitating discourse or democratic processes is in jeopardy. In this extended abstract we...

Health and finance are two aspects of life that are crucially important. Health and finance sites are the most frequently visited by online participants. The sheer volume of sites and the variety of information and advice available online on those two topics have left individuals with potentially greater support for their decision-making (DM) processes. This paper uses the Netnography qualitati...

We take decisions every moment of our lives. What do we eat? Which phone to buy? What book to read? Do we rent or buy? What retirement plan to choose? What should be our career? For every one of these decisions most of us turn to online social networks (OSN) to seek information, advice, and support. OSN have become widely popular as a source of data or reference for those seeking advice.

Inferring Online Social Networks (OSN) group members may help to evaluate the authenticity of an applicant asking to join a certain group, and secure vulnerable populations online, such as children. We propose machine learning based methods, which associate OSN members’ affiliation with virtual groups based on personal, topological, and group affiliation features. The study applies and evaluate...

Most developed countries face an aging population, leading to various challenges due to this demographic change. On average, people turn from working life to retirement at the age of 65. Related changes in their social environment threat their health, i.e. due to perceived social exclusion. Online Social Networks (OSN) may help them to overcome this problem. However, usability issues due to use...