The following dissertation presents the history of myrmecology from the times of Ulisse Aldrovandi up to the works of Edward O. Wilson in the 20th century. The oldest mentions of ants in the Antiquity and the Middle Ages are also partially elaborated upon. A special emphasis is given to the general idea about ants as developed by each of the authors, as well as to the mapping out of the contemporary ideas about social insect. This work points out that the portrait of the ant has always been related to the contemporary conception of human society and humanity as such. Throughout its history, myrmecology has always been strongly influenced by anthropomorphism, as the picture of the ant would be derived from the social order, political system and the general opinion on what constitutes human nature. On the other hand, though, myrmecology has also helped to shape the picture of humanity, because the conclusions drawn from myrmecological studies were applied to humans. Therefore, entomology started to influence anthropology and vice versa. In the Antiquity, ants were viewed basically as farmers; only harvester ants were known, they were seen as working on a field, going to the marketplace or holding celebratory festivals. The medieval picture of the ant drew heavily on the Antiquity ideas, but it added...

The resources and localization abilities available in modern smartphones have provided a huge boost to the popularity of location-based applications. In these applications, users send their current locations to a central service provider and can receive content or an enhanced experience predicated on their provided location. Privacy issues with location- based applications can arise from a central entity being able to store large amounts of information about users (e.g., contact information, attributes) and locations (e.g., available businesses, users present). We propose an architecture for a privacy-friendly location hub to encourage the development of mobile location-based social applications with privacy- preserving features. Our primary goal is to store information such that no entity in our architecture can link a user’s identity to her location. We also aim to decouple storing data from manipulating data for social networking purposes. Other goals include designing an architecture flexible enough to support a wide range of use cases and avoiding considerable client-side computation. Our architecture consists of separate server components for storing information about users and storing information about locations, as well as client devices and optional com- ponents in the cloud for supporting applications. We describe the design of API functions exposed by the server components and demonstrate how they can be used to build some sample mobile location-based social applications. A proof-of-concept implementation is provided with in-depth descriptions of how each function was realized, as well as experi- ments examining the practicality of our architecture. Finally, we present two real-world applications developed on the Android platform to demonstrate how these applications work from a user’s perspective.

The resources and localization abilities available in modern smartphones have provided a huge boost to the popularity of location-based applications. In these applications, users send their current locations to a central service provider and can receive content or an enhanced experience predicated on their provided location. Privacy issues with location- based applications can arise from a central entity being able to store large amounts of information about users (e.g., contact information, attributes) and locations (e.g., available businesses, users present). We propose an architecture for a privacy-friendly location hub to encourage the development of mobile location-based social applications with privacy- preserving features. Our primary goal is to store information such that no entity in our architecture can link a user’s identity to her location. We also aim to decouple storing data from manipulating data for social networking purposes. Other goals include designing an architecture flexible enough to support a wide range of use cases and avoiding considerable client-side computation. Our architecture consists of separate server components for storing information about users and storing information about locations, as well as client devices and optional com- ponents in the cloud for supporting applications. We describe the design of API functions exposed by the server components and demonstrate how they can be used to build some sample mobile location-based social applications. A proof-of-concept implementation is provided with in-depth descriptions of how each function was realized, as well as experi- ments examining the practicality of our architecture. Finally, we present two real-world applications developed on the Android platform to demonstrate how these applications work from a user’s perspective.

In this dissertation, I enumerate several privacy problems in online social networks (OSNs) and describe a system called Footlights that addresses them. Footlights is a platform for distributed social applications that allows users to control the sharing of private information. It is designed to compete with the performance of today's centralised OSNs, but it does not trust centralised infrastructure to enforce security properties. Based on several socio-technical scenarios, I extract concrete technical problems to be solved and show how the existing research literature does not solve them. Addressing these problems fully would fundamentally change users' interactions with OSNs, providing real control over online sharing. I also demonstrate that today's OSNs do not provide this control: both user data and the social graph are vulnerable to practical privacy attacks. Footlights' storage substrate provides private, scalable, sharable storage using untrusted servers. Under realistic assumptions, the direct cost of operating this storage system is less than one US dollar per user-year. It is the foundation for a practical shared filesystem, a perfectly unobservable communications channel and a distributed application platform. The Footlights application platform allows third-party developers to write social applications without direct access to users' private data. Applications run in a confined environment with a private-by-default security model: applications can only access user information with explicit user consent. I demonstrate that practical applications can be written on this platform. The security of Footlights user data is based on public-key cryptography, but users are able to log in to the system without carrying a private key on a hardware token. Instead, users authenticate to a set of authentication agents using a weak secret such as a user-chosen password or randomly-assigned 4-digit number. The protocol is designed to be secure even in the face of malicious authentication agents.

Réseaux sociaux (RS) (par exemple, Facebook, Twitter et LinkedIn) ont gagné en popularité écrasante et accumulé des données numériques massives sur la société humaine. Ces données massives, représentant de l’information personnelle et sociale des individus, nous offrent des possibilités sans précédent pour étudier, analyser et modéliser la structure de réseau complexe, les relations humaines, les gens similitude, etc. Pendant ce temps, les RS ont déclenché un grand nombre d’applications et de services qui rentables chercher à maintenir des liens de vibrer et l’expérience des utilisateurs d’avance. Dans ce contexte, comment concevoir ces applications et les services, en particulier comment extraire et d’exploiter des fonctionnalités sociales efficaces à partir des données massives disponibles pour améliorer les applications et les services, a reçu beaucoup d’attention. Cette thèse, visant à améliorer les applications et les services sociaux, étudie trois questions essentielles et pratiques RS: (1) Comment pouvons-nous explorer les amis potentiels pour un utilisateur d’établir et d’élargir ses liens sociaux? (2) comment pouvons-nous découvrir un contenu intéressant pour un utilisateur pour satisfaire ses goûts personnels? (3) comment pouvons-nous informer un utilisateur du risque d’exposition de son information privée pour préserver sa vie privée? S’appuyant sur les idées sur la similarité de personnes dans les sciences sociales, cette thèse étudie les effets et les applications de l’utilisateur similitude dans les RS pour résoudre les problèmes mentionnés ci-dessus. Plus précisément, les sociologues suggèrent que la similitude engendre connexion et induit principe homophilie que les gens similaires (par exemple, même âge, l’éducation ou la profession) sont plus susceptibles de communiquer, de confiance et de partager l’information avec l’autre que ceux dissemblables. Inspiré par ces résultats, cette thèse étudie le principe de similitude répandue dans RS en termes de savoir si les utilisateurs similaires seraient proches dans leurs relations sociales, similaire dans leurs intérêts, ou approximative dans leur géo distance, en se appuyant sur 500K profils d’utilisateurs recueillies auprès de Facebook; il explore en outre des solutions pour exploiter efficacement le principe de similitude observée pour concevoir les quatre applications et des services sociaux suivantes: • Effets de Similarité de L’utilisateur sur Lien Prévision pour les Nouveaux Utilisateurs : nous analysons la prédiction de liaison pour les nouveaux utilisateurs qui n’ont pas créé de lien. Basé sur l’information limitée obtenu lors de votre inscription la procédure de nouveaux utilisateurs, ainsi que les attributs et les liens des utilisateurs existants dans un RS, nous étudions la façon dont beaucoup de similitude entre deux utilisateurs affecterait la probabilité qu’ils se lient d’amitié. En conséquence, nous proposons un modèle de prédiction de liaison efficace pour les nouveaux utilisateurs. • Similarité Minière de L’utilisateur pour la Découverte de Contenu en Réseaux P2P Sociale : nous examinons comment similarité et connaissances des participants dans RS pourraient bénéficier leur découverte de contenu dans les réseaux P2P. Nous construisons un modèle de réseau P2P sociale où chaque pair attribue plus de poids à ses amis dans RS qui ont similarité supérieur et plus de connaissances. Utilisation de marche aléatoire avec la méthode de redémarrage, nous présentons un nouveau contenu algorithme de découverte le dessus du modèle de réseau P2P sociale proposé. • Inspection intérêt similarité - Prédiction et Application : nous présentons des études empiriques détaillées sur les intérêts similitude et de révéler que les gens sont susceptibles de présenter des goûts similaires s’ils ont des informations démographiques similaires (par exemple, âge, lieu), ou s’elles sont amis. Par conséquent, étant donné un nouvel utilisateur dont les intérêts (...) / Online Social Networks (OSNs) (e.g., Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) have gained overwhelming popularity and accumulated massive digital data about human society. These massive data, representing individuals' personal and social information, provide us with unprecedented opportunities to study, analyze and model the complex network structure, human connections, people similarity, etc. Meanwhile, OSNs have triggered a large number of profitable applications and services which seek to maintain vibrate connections and advance users' experience. In this context, how to devise such applications and services, especially how to extract and exploit effective social features from the massive available data to enhance the applications and services, has received much attention. This dissertation, aiming to enhance the social applications and services, investigates three critical and practical issues in OSNs: (1) How can we explore potential friends for a user to establish and enlarge her social connections? (2) How can we discover interesting content for a user to satisfy her personal tastes? (3) How can we inform a user the exposure risk of her private information to preserve her privacy? Drawing on the insights about people's similarity in social science, this dissertation studies the widespread similarity principle in OSN in terms of whether similar users would be close in their social relationships, similar in their interests, or approximate in their geo-distance, relying on 500K user profiles collected from Facebook; it further explores solutions to effectively leverage the observed similarity principle to address the aforementioned practical issues

<p>When more than one user uses a system with a single input device, the person in charge of the control is often active, and the by-sitters become passive. This situation can lead to frustration and boredom among the by-sitters. One way to solve this problem could be to distribute the con-trol over the system so that more than one user can control the system simultaneously. These systems, where many users can work simultane-ously with separate input devices connected to the same, shared screen, are called Single Display Groupwares. In this report, a single display groupware prototype for surfing news co-operatively was developed. The purpose of the prototype was to find out if the use of SDGs is likely to be a successful way to engage by-sitters and support co-operation while surfing news through a media terminal. The system was tested on pairs of users. The subjects of thestudy were observed while using the system, and a number of patterns in the users’ strategies in dealing with the si-multaneous input situation emerged. The main conclusions that were drawn from the study were that multiple input can be a good solution when the system is so complex that the use can be divided into several parallel sub-activities. When the use of the system can’t be split into parallel sub-activities, the users will only hinder each other, and the ex-tra input device will just make the division of control unclear without giving any benefit.</p>

„Socialinis tinklas – interaktyvi interneto struktūra (interneto svetainė) vienijanti tam tikrą, bendrų interesų turinčią narių grupę, kuri ir kuria konkrečios svetainės turinį ir virtualiai bendrauja tarpusavyje, automatizuotomis konkrečios svetainės priemonėmis. Socialiniai tinklai – paskutiniu metu aktyviai besivystanti interneto dalis, kuriai galima priskirti tiek paprastus diskusijų forumus, tiek sudėtingus visuomeninius ir (ar) komercinius interneto projektus.“ Pats populiariausias socialinis tinklas Pasaulyje yra facebook.com, http://www.socialbakers.com teigimu Lietuvoje turintis 1 132 000 vartotojų. Taip pat didžioji dalis didelįų įmonių ir prekės ženklų turi savo įmonės/prekės ženklo puslapį facebook.com socialiniame tinkle, tokiu būdu siekdami padidinti pardavimus, prekinio ženklo žinomumą. Pagrindinė problema naujiems puslapiams, kad darosi vis sunkiau pritraukti naujų fanų. Puslapių savininkai rengia įvarius konkursus, kurie yra mažai efektyvūs, jais nepasiekiama planuoto rezultato. Facebook.com taip pat suteikia galimybę kurti programas trečiosioms šalims, kurių pagalba jie gali pasiekti informaciją esančią facebook.com duomenų bazėse, naudotis jų suteiktomis funkcijomis. Jų efektyvumas nepalyginamai didesnis, nei anksčiau minėtų akcijų ir konkursų. Tačiau tokių programų kūrimas kainuoja dideles sumas. Kuriama aplikacija, skirta be jokių programavimo žinių įdiegti ją į savo serverį ir taip didinti savo puslapio žinomumą. Programos pagalba vartotojai už... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Social networks becoming more and more popular and they have an increasingly important role for every people and also for busines. Curently, there are many social networs, but the famuos is facebook. And the Facebook allows you to create applications third parties.The aplications can be used for games, comunication, but mostly for busines. There is a document about application of company marketing in facebook social network, which helps to popularize Facebook page. And here you can find analytical, requirements specification, specification of software architecture, testing conclusions, and also user documentation parts. In analytical part you can find similar systems comparison and why social aplicacions is nessary for busines. Requirements specification describes complete description of the behavior of a system to be developed and includea a set of use cases that describe interactions the users will have with the software. In addition it also contains functional and non-functional requirements. Testing document presents the results of testing and possible system errors. User documentations hows how to use the system and iliustrates it with lots of screenshots.

When more than one user uses a system with a single input device, the person in charge of the control is often active, and the by-sitters become passive. This situation can lead to frustration and boredom among the by-sitters. One way to solve this problem could be to distribute the con-trol over the system so that more than one user can control the system simultaneously. These systems, where many users can work simultane-ously with separate input devices connected to the same, shared screen, are called Single Display Groupwares. In this report, a single display groupware prototype for surfing news co-operatively was developed. The purpose of the prototype was to find out if the use of SDGs is likely to be a successful way to engage by-sitters and support co-operation while surfing news through a media terminal. The system was tested on pairs of users. The subjects of thestudy were observed while using the system, and a number of patterns in the users’ strategies in dealing with the si-multaneous input situation emerged. The main conclusions that were drawn from the study were that multiple input can be a good solution when the system is so complex that the use can be divided into several parallel sub-activities. When the use of the system can’t be split into parallel sub-activities, the users will only hinder each other, and the ex-tra input device will just make the division of control unclear without giving any benefit.