Local View Research Articles

Privacy-Preserving Analytics on Decentralized Social Graphs: The Case of Eigendecomposition

Analytics over social graphs allows to extract valuable knowledge and insights for many fields like community detection, fraud detection, and interest mining. In practice, decentralized social graphs frequently arise, where the social graph is not available to a single entity and is decentralized among a large number of users, each holding only a limited local view about the whole graph. Collecting the local views for analytics of decentralized social graphs raises critical privacy concerns, as they encode private information about the social interactions among individuals. In this paper, we design, implement, and evaluate PrivGED, a new system aimed at privacy-preserving analytics over decentralized social graphs. PrivGED focuses on the support for eigendecomposition, one popular and fundamental graph analytics task producing eigenvalues/eigenvectors over the adjacency matrix of a social graph and benefits various practical applications. PrivGED is built from a delicate synergy of insights on graph analytics, lightweight cryptography, and differential privacy, allowing users to securely contribute their local views on a decentralized social graph for a cloud-based eigendecomposition analytics service while gaining strong privacy protection. Extensive experiments over real-world social graph datasets demonstrate that PrivGED achieves accuracy comparable to the plaintext domain, with practically affordable performance superior to prior art.

G2L: A Global to Local Alignment Method for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation aims to transfer knowledge from a source dataset with dense pixel-level annotations to an unlabeled target dataset. However, the performance of UDA methods often suffers from the domain shift, which is the discrepancy between the feature distributions of the two domains. There have been several attempts to match these distributions at the image level marginally. However, due to the so-called category-level domain shift, such global alignments do not guarantee a good separability of deep features extracted from different categories in the target domain. As a result, the generated pseudo-labels can be noisy and thus poison the learning process on the target domain. Some recent methods focus on denoising the pseudo-labels online using category-wise information. This paper introduces a novel UDA method called Global-to-Local alignment (G2L) that leverages fine-grained adversarial training and a newly proposed chromatic Fourier transform to address the image-level domain shift from a global perspective. Next, our method deals with the category-level domain shift under a local view. Specifically, we propose a long-tail category rating strategy as well as apply dynamic confidence thresholds and category-wise priority weights when generating and denoising the pseudo-labels to favor rare categories. Finally, self-distillation is used to boost the final segmentation results. Experiments on popular benchmarks GTA5 → Cityscapes and SYNTHIA → Cityscapes show that our method yields superior accuracy performance than other state-of-the-art methods.

Multiorder Interaction Information Embedding-Based Multiview Fusion-Aided Hyperspectral Image Classification

Hyperspectral images (HSI) are obtained from hyperspectral imaging sensors, which capture information in hundreds of spectral bands of objects. However, how to take full advantage of spatial and spectral information from many spectral bands to improve the performance of HSI classification remains an open question. Many HSI classification works have recently been reported by employing multi-view learning (MVL) algorithms that can fully use complementary information between different view features and thus have received widespread attention. This paper proposes a multi-view fusion network based on multi-order interaction information embedding for HSI classification. Firstly, the correlation matrix between spectral bands is used to divide the original data into multiple subsets as local views. The subset after the Segmented-PCA process is used as the global view. Secondly, the features of different views are extracted separately using a feature extraction network and mapped to the same dimension. Pre-fusion is achieved by multi-order interaction of various view features. Finally, loss-weighted fusion is applied to each view according to its contribution to the classification task. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, complete experiments were conducted on three commonly used HSI datasets, namely Pavia University, Houston 2013, and Houston 2018. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method improves the classification performance of existing feature extraction networks and is more competitive with other methods in the field.

Towards Private Learning on Decentralized Graphs With Local Differential Privacy

Many real-world networks are inherently decentralized. For example, in social networks, each user maintains a local view of a social graph, such as a list of friends and her profile. It is typical to collect these local views of social graphs and conduct graph learning tasks. However, learning over graphs can raise privacy concerns as these local views often contain sensitive information. In this paper, we seek to ensure private graph learning on a decentralized network graph. Towards this objective, we propose <i>Solitude</i>, a new privacy-preserving learning framework based on graph neural networks (GNNs), with formal privacy guarantees based on edge local differential privacy. The crux of <i>Solitude</i> is a set of new delicate mechanisms that can calibrate the introduced noise in the decentralized graph collected from the users. The principle behind the calibration is the intrinsic properties shared by many real-world graphs, such as sparsity. Unlike existing work on locally private GNNs, our new framework can simultaneously protect node feature privacy and edge privacy, and can seamlessly incorporate with any GNN with privacy-utility guarantees. Extensive experiments on benchmarking datasets show that <i>Solitude</i> can retain the generalization capability of the learned GNN while preserving the users&#x2019; data privacy under given privacy budgets.

Educational Migration of Young People and Optimization of the Network of Universities in Cities of Different Sizes

As a result of measures related to the liquidation of inefficient universities and low-quality education, the university network of Russia in 2013-2019 has significantly changed its configuration. In particular, the total number of universities decreased by 42%, including parent universities by 23%, branches by 56%. At the same time, the number of students decreased by 33% over the same period, the reform occurred during a period of demographic decline in the youth age cohorts. However, the consequences of the reform to optimize the network of universities could have a different impact on the structure of urban and regional higher education systems in different parts of the country. Most of the federal and departmental statistics describing the situation in the field of higher education, and, accordingly, the results of research, are presented at the national or regional levels. However, almost all universities are located in cities, and this key level from the point of view of spatial localization of educational institutions falls out of the pool of educational analytics and research. Large cities everywhere attract young people with a wide range of factors. One of them is the possibility of choosing a university and an educational program. Other factors are related to the quality of the environment and services, the breadth and diversity of the labor market, which positively distinguish large cities from less populated places. The available data do not allow us to divide the migration attractiveness of the city for young people into those related to the presence of a university and the quality of educational services provided by it and those related to other possible factors of attractiveness. However, we can analyze whether there presentation of universities in cities of different sizes is correlated with their migration attractiveness, expressed in net migration indicators of 15-19-year olds. The conducted research has shown that the cities with a population of over 250 thousand people are the most attractive for migration and at the same time the least subjected to the reorganization of the university network. The concentration of universities in the largest cities of the country contributes to the strengthening of centripetal migration of young people. Small towns have experienced the main consequences of the implementation of state policy measures aimed at improving the quality of higher education. For many applicants from small and medium-sized cities, having one university or branch was the only opportunity to get a higher education without leaving their hometown.

Living with Gorillas? Lessons from Batwa-Gorillas' Convivial Relations at Bwindi Forest, Uganda

In recent years, convivial conservation has been proposed as a better alternative to fortress conservation by working with marginalised communities. This is a welcome development because most of the injustices and failures of fortress conservation arose from neglecting local communities' view of being with nature, and knowledges of nature (plural of knowledge highlights that there are multiple ways and types of acquiring and transmitting knowledge through generations). A critical analysis of the conservation literature indicates a disharmony between the indigenous ways, and Northern ways of being with nature—an ontological discord in conservation. This article considers convivial conservation as starting point to address this discord. Based on the content analysis of stories of Batwa's historical relations with gorillas, unstructured interviews, ethnographic village stays, and empirical observations, we argue that open-mindedness—to learn from, to be affected by and affect our fellow dwellers on earth (human and non-human)—marks the starting point of convivial living. Therefore, convivial conservation can further be enriched by expanding the scope of historical reparations to include knowledges that have been historically excluded. To do so, convivial conservation scholars need to emphasise the co-creation of knowledge with their human and non-human counterparts. By doing so, these scholars will safeguard against marginalising other ways of knowing, thus achieving its transformative agenda.

Trabajo social clínico: una mirada desde lo social, económico y político

This conference is part of the keynote presentations of the Annual Symposium of the College of Social Work Professionals of Puerto Rico. It aspires to approximate the different local, regional, and international views of clinical social work. For this, some milestones in the genesis and development of the clinical dimension will be reviewed. The aspiration is to locate the social, political, and economic context in which this specialized practice is exercised. The contextual analysis aims to critique clinical social work centered on the medical model as one that psychologizes the social question “cuestión social” and commodifies mental health outside of a rights approach. Anti-oppressive and counter-hegemonic methods and therapeutic approaches are proposed to develop professional work. Finally, the need to discuss this practice and create agreements that differentiate it from other mental health disciplines and provide it with a political-ethical identity is highlighted.

Конструирование образа будущего территорий: мировоззренческие подходы

The dramatic changes in Russian society require a new type of thinking and new approaches to envisioning the future development of territories. It is shown that there are two main worldview approaches to this process: philosophical and economic. It is noted that the overarching message to construct a vision of the future should be based on fulfilling people’s needs, in particular their self-actualization. The level of civilizational relations of the local community, its traditions, customs, and views are the main factors that influence the success or failure of the project. The crucial role in the decision-making should be played by local administrative and economic leaders. The key steps in the construction of the image of the future of a territory should include the study of the territory’s socio-economic history, analysis of its potential, priority-setting, and planning.

LSTM-Based Collaborative Source-Side DDoS Attack Detection

As denial of service attacks become more sophisticated, the source-side detection techniques are being studied to solve the limitations of target-side detection techniques such as delayed detection and difficulty in tracking attackers. Recently, some source-side detection techniques are being studied to use an adaptive attack detection threshold considering seasonal behavior of network traffic. However, because patterns of network traffic usage have become irregular with increased randomness and explosive traffic, the performance of the adaptive threshold technique has deteriorated. In addition, by limitations of the local view of a single site, distributed attacks from multiple sites may not be detected. In this paper, we propose a LSTM (Long Short Term Memory) based collaborative source-side DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack detection framework which provides the attack detection result of a collaboration network in a global view. The proposed framework applies LSTM-based adaptive thresholds to each source-side network to mitigate performance degradation caused by irregular network traffic behavior. Also, in order to overcome the limitation of performance caused by the local view of single source-side network, the proposed framework constructs a collaborative network through multiple detection sites and aggregates feedback from each site, such as detection rates, local traffic patterns, and timestamp. The collaborative attack detection technique uses the aggregated feedback to determine whether the attack is finally detected and shares the finial detection results with multiple sites. Depending on this final detection result, the adaptive thresholds of each site are reset. Through extensive evaluation of actual network traffic data, the proposed collaborative source-side attack detection technique shows around 15% lower false positive rate than the single source-side attack detection technique while maintaining a high detection rate.

Extending indigenous knowledge to unveil the evolutionary journey of food preferences and socio-cultural phenomena

Food acceptance is substantially influenced by eating behavior and society norms in relation to preferences, lifestyles, and socio-cultural practices. Food innovation communities need to comprehend the impact of changing trends in eating behavior as a driving force. Meanwhile, many studies indicate that indigenous knowledge plays an important role in uncovering various social phenomena and interpreting local holistic views, cultural ecology, and behavior. However, it is not easy to employ this knowledge due to its fragmented form. This study aims to exhibit a systematic process for investigating scattered indigenous food knowledge and revealing the evolution of socio-cultural movement and food preferences. Initially, ontology-based indigenous food knowledge was structured for this study using the qualitative method, with data subsequently gathered from cookbooks and cremation festschrifts using the quantitative method to construct a knowledge-based system. A total of 2486 recipes recorded in cookbooks dating back to 1782 were retrospectively considered; the findings of which revealed the evolutionary journey of food preferences and its cultural culinary impact.

“In came the self-evident and luminous little mess”: Ethical Life Writing in Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent i

Abstract Starting from a brief examination of Muriel Spark’s position as a Scottish novelist within the framework of her anti-essentialist, anti-authoritative aesthetics, my essay will take a seemingly abrupt, but in fact consequential turn to investigate the complex antinomies involved in her fictional representation of the lives of others. Although at home and abroad she is hailed as Scotland’s most celebrated author of the twentieth century, Spark’s writerly practice consists of regularly dismantling grand narratives or fixed, stable identities, often clashing with more localized or prescriptive views on the social and national functions of narrative. My argument, however, is that it is the very unease of her “Scottishness” that acts as one of the foundations of her literary ethics, embodied in her acute awareness of the antinomies involved in textualizing the lives of others. Spark’s shrewdly metafictional Loitering with Intent (1981) openly thematizes both the obligation, and the risks of telling one’s own and other people’s stories, performing a radical ethics of narrative alterity through its staging of the enmeshments of writing, (auto)biography and experience.

Sustainable Socio-cultural Aspect Within Green Building User Behavior in Bali, Indonesia

The definition of green building is related to the design strategy and use of technology in buildings to create efficient energy utilization and minimize negative impacts on both the environment and the health of its users. User behavior is a significant determinant because to achieve green building parameters in the technical aspects alone is hard and, in the long term, must be supported by user behavior patterns with a responsive understanding of energy efficiency goals. This paper aims to conduct an initial study that focuses on the socio-cultural aspects of green building users’ behavior in Bali. This paper does not discuss quantitative matters on the green building parameters. Instead, it focuses on formulating a basic knowledge about the influence of user behavior with Balinese socio-cultural characteristics to become a reference at the building management level for the specific green building’s success. The method used in this paper is a qualitative descriptive method with literature review approach. The socio-cultural factor that affected Bali’s user behavior was influenced by green building principles’ technical issues and pro-environmental action in general. The more specific element is culture, local wisdom, and the religious value that leads to environmental awareness. The perspective of Bali’s green building user can be defined as the user’s local socio-culture views, the principles of green building perspectives and organization and management level perspective..

The impact of skills and training on local development

The impact of skills and training on local development

Calusa socioecological histories and zooarchaeological indicators of environmental change during the Little Ice Age in southwestern Florida, USA

The Pineland Site Complex, 8LL1902, is a large archaeological complex of middens, mounds, and other topographic features located in coastal, southwestern Florida. It was occupied from approximately AD 50 and was a major Calusa town at European contact. We combine extant research from this well-preserved site complex with new chronological and zooarchaeological analyses to provide new insight into the relationship between fisher-gatherer-hunter subsistence economies and small-scale but impactful climatic change. We identify and record the localized environmental changes co-occurrent with the global climatic episode known as the Little Ice Age (AD 1200–1850). By combining Bayesian statistical analyses of radiocarbon dates with zooarchaeological analyses of a waterlogged, shoreline midden we generate a high-resolution, localized view of socioecological interactions at the Pineland Site ca. AD 1200–1500. Such micro-scale temporal perspectives are necessary to achieve high resolution, localized histories of human-climate dynamics.

Co-Management in Mangrove Rehabilitation at Langkat Regency

Collaboration in the management of mangrove areas is a role for every social element in local government, the community, and the private sector. Co-management is an alternative solution in the form of management that integrates the roles and interests of everyone in the mangrove rehabilitation program. This study aims to analyze the role and level of influence of the interests of each actor in mangrove rehabilitation activities in Langkat Regency. The research method uses descriptive-qualitative data collected from the results of questionnaires, interviews; Field observations are processed in the form described in the description in the tabulation. From the results of this study, the form of joint management in mangrove rehabilitation is at a consultative stage where the government starts to consider local views in the decision-making process, the level of participation of each stakeholder is in a low category, so this Study recommends that the form of participation of each stakeholder can be improved through the form of joint regulations, sustainability programs and systematic work distribution that is disseminated to every implementer of mangrove rehabilitation programs in Langkat District.

Promoting Metro Operation Safety by Exploring Metro Operation Accident Network

Abstract Understanding the causation of accidents is essential to promote metro operation safety. In terms of 243 reported metro operation accident cases in China, a directed weighted network was constructed based on complex network theory, where nodes and directed edges denotes factors and event chains respectively. To reveal the key causal factors, the topological characteristics of metro operation accident network (MOAN) were analyzed from both global and local views. The results show that facility-type factors are more closely related to the occurrence of the accidents from the perspectives of average path length and cascading effects. Accident types like train delay and train suspension are the great risk recipients. Key causal factors with large out-degree, out-strength, betweenness centrality and cluster coefficient, such as communication and signal failure, vehicle failure and piling into the train should be noticed. The research framework proposed in the paper is not only applicable to China’s metro operation system, but also appropriate for other transportation system safety studies.

Comparing Community Capacities by Local Actors and External Experts: An Audit of Health Promotion Activities in Lenzsiedlung, Hamburg

The questionnaire "Capacity building in Neighbourhoods (KEQ)" has five dimensions which are regarded as intermediary outcome results of community health promotion. The questionnaire was to be completed by local actors and thus has some features of self-evaluation. We wanted to find out whether external experts make similar or more critical assessments. We conducted an audit of the health promotion activities in our intervention area (Hamburg neighbourhood Lenzsiedlung) in two steps. Five external health promotion experts functioned as auditors with experience in evaluating good practice projects of health promotion. The first part of the audit was a document-based evaluation, the second part a visit-based one during a two-day stay in the intervention area. In the comparison of local actors' assessments (KEQ questionnaire results) with those of external experts in the document-based audit, the judgements of external experts were more positive on all five dimensions of the questionnaire (deviations from +0.1 to +0.9 on a scale from 1 to 5). In the visit-based audit, there was convergence in the assessments of the local actors and the external experts. They were partly identical; only the dimension "local leadership" was viewed slightly more critically by the external experts. Based on our discussion of the four methodical problems of the comparison, we conclude that, on the whole, local actors do not tend to evaluate their activities too positively. However, if resources are available, one should try to confirm local views of outcomes by external assessments.

Tradisi Je’ne-Je’ne Sappara Di Desa Balangloe Kecamatan Tarowang Kabupaten Jeneponto Perspektif Hukum Islam

The aims of this study are: (i) to find out how the local community views the Je'ne-Je'ne Sappara tradition. (i) From this study, we can find out how the views of Islamic law are on the Je'ne-Je'ne Sappara traditional ceremony in Balangloe village, Tarowang sub-district, Jeneponto district. The type of this research is classified as field research or field research that is descriptive in nature with the research approach used: the syar'i approach, and the social/sociological approach. namely, observation, interviews, and documentation. The results of the study will produce the following: (1) The je'ne-je'ne sappara tradition procession is carried out in the month of safar, which is when you enter 7 trips to 14 trips every year. It is held on the seaside of the village of Balagloe Tarowang for 7 days and 6 nights. (2) The people of Balagloe Tarowang strongly adhere to the traditions of their ancestors, people believe that when they do not carry out the tradition, they will get reinforcements or disaster, this act has violated Islamic law because they believe in something outside the provisions of Allah swt.Keywords: Tradition; Sappara; Islamic Law

Divergent views on trophy hunting in Africa, and what this may mean for research and policy

AbstractOver the past decade, trophy hunting in Africa has seen increased public and scientific interest. Much of that attention has come from outside of Africa, with little emphasis on local views. We circulated an online survey through international networks to explore demographic and regional differences in opinion regards support for African trophy hunting, trophy import bans, and outside funding of conservation estates supported by hunting. We received ∼5700 responses and found that location, demography, and conservation background influenced opinion. African and North American respondents showed (significantly) more support for trophy hunting than respondents from Europe or other areas, as did respondents with conservation backgrounds. Unlike North Americans, Africans supported external subsidies of wildlife areas presently funded by hunting. Many factors affected opinions on African hunting, but respondent location played a major role. Realistic policy on African trophy hunting should thus integrate African perspectives, in particular those of rural communities.

Alaska Native Elders\u2019 perspectives on dietary patterns in rural, remote communities

BackgroundGiven the increasing rates of childhood obesity in Alaska Native children and the understanding that the most effective interventions are informed by and reflect the cultural knowledge of the community in which they are implemented, this project sought to gather the wisdom of local Yup’ik and Cup’ik Elders in the Yukon-Kuskokwim region of Alaska around how to maintain a healthy diet and active lifestyle.MethodsPerspectives were sought through the use of semi-structured focus groups, which were completed in person in twelve communities. All conversations were recorded, translated, transcribed, and analyzed using a qualitative approach, where key themes were identified.ResultsElders provided a clear and consistent recollection of what their life looked like when they were young and expressed their perspectives related to maintaining a healthy and traditional lifestyle. The key themes the Elders discussed included an emphasis on the nutritional and cultural benefits of traditional foods; concerns around changing dietary patterns such as the consumption of processed foods and sugar sweetened beverages; and concerns on the time and use of screens. Elders also expressed a desire to help younger generations learn traditional subsistence practices.ConclusionsThe risk of obesity in Alaska Native children is high and intervention efforts should be grounded in local knowledge and values. The perspectives from Yup’ik and Cup’ik Elders in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta area of Alaska provide a better understanding on local views of how to maintain a healthy diet, physical activities, and traditional values.