Social Glue

A Modular Development Platform for Community-oriented Services

Web communities are virtual worlds where people may meet and interact. This interaction may take different forms: sharing data, participating to collaborative tasks, organizing events and activities, entertaining, etc. The incredible spread of Web communities is a recent, and still growing, phenomenon. According to recent statistics, the number of users of Web communities is around hundreds of millions (Facebook alone exceeds 500M of active users).

Although Web communities have become a crucial part of the daily life of more than 1/5 of world population, scientific research in such area has begun quite recently, and many problems remain open. In addition to the well-known issues related to distributed systems (concurrency, heterogeneity, mobility, security, etc.), Web community services are typically provided on a “best effort” basis, without any concrete guarantees e.g. about how privacy issues are dealt with, about the policies which regulate the interaction among users, etc.

A further problem is the lack of sound, well-established methodologies and tools for the development of Web community services. This makes expensive to create and customize communities which have specific features, and which have to run on a variety of different devices, ranging from Web clients to several kinds of tablets and smart-phones.

The “Social Glue” project aims at studying and experimenting new specification, analysis and development techniques for Web communities. Specific goals include:

  • Models, policies and mechanisms for enforcing security and privacy properties;
  • Study of collective behavior which regulate the dynamics of Web communities;
  • Modular development techniques and tools for Web communities;
  • Interaction and integration with mobile platforms

A concrete artifact of our research will be an open-source software platform for the development of community-oriented services.

This project has been partially funded by the Autonomous Region of Sardinia, under project CGM (Coarse Grain Recommendation), through Pacchetto Integrato di Agevolazione (PIA) 2008 “Industria Artigianato e Servizi”.

Project Members

Università degli Studi di Cagliari - Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica

Project Coordinators

  • Massimo Bartoletti
  • Salvatore Carta

Reseach Associates

  • Linda Brodo
  • Ludovico Boratto
  • Tiziana Cimoli
  • Fabrizio Mulas
  • Paolo Pilloni
  • G. Michele Pinna
  • Luis Fernando Pino Duque
  • Roberto Saia

PhD Students

  • Maurizio Murgia
  • Alessandro Sebastian Podda
  • Livio Pompianu
  • Alceste Scalas

Temporary contract holders

  • Margherita Cabras
  • Mirko Joshia Mascia
  • Maria Luisa Mulas
  • Maria Grazia Patteri
  • Livio Pompianu
  • Giordano Sini

Publications

2015

  1. M. Bartoletti, M. Murgia, A. Scalas, R. Zunino. Verifiable abstractions for contract-oriented systems. Accepted for publication in JLAMP.
  2. M. Bartoletti, T. Cimoli, M. Murgia, L. Pompianu, A.S. Podda. A contract-oriented middleware. To be presented at FACS 2015.
  3. M. Bartoletti, R. Zunino. On the decidability of honesty and of its variants. To appear in Proc. WSFM/BEAT, 2015
  4. M. Bartoletti, I. Castellani, P.M. Deniélou, M. Dezani-Ciancaglini, S. Ghilezan, J. Pantovic, J.A. Pérez, P. Thiemann, B. Toninho, H.T. Vieira. Combining behavioural types with security analysis. Accepted for publication in JLAMP, 2015.
  5. M. Bartoletti, T. Cimoli, R. Zunino. Compliance in behavioural contracts: a brief survey. Festschrift Symposium in Honour of Pierpaolo Degano, 2015.
  6. M. Bartoletti, T. Cimoli, G. M. Pinna. Lending Petri nets. Accepted for publication in Science of Computer Programming.
  7. M. Bartoletti, T. Cimoli, G.M. Pinna, R. Zunino. Contracts as games on event structures. Accepted for publication in JLAMP.
  8. A. Scalas, M. Bartoletti. The LTS WorkBench. In Proc. ICE, 2015.
  9. M. Bartoletti, P. Degano, P. Di Giamberardino, R. Zunino. Debits and credits in Petri nets and Linear Logic. In LRC, 2015
  10. M. Bartoletti, T. Cimoli, M. Murgia, L. Pompianu, A.S. Podda. Compliance and subtyping in timed session types. In Proc. FORTE, 2015.
  11. M. Bartoletti, T. Cimoli, P. Di Giamberardino, R. Zunino. Vicious circles in contracts and in logic. In Science of Computer Programming 109, 2015.
  12. M. Bartoletti, J. Lange, A. Scalas, R. Zunino. Choreographies in the wild. In Science of Computer Programming 109, 2015.
  13. M. Bartoletti, P. Degano, G. Ferrari and R. Zunino. Model checking usage policies. In Mathematical Structures in Computer Science 25(3), 2015.
  14. M. Bartoletti, T. Cimoli, G.M. Pinna, R. Zunino. Models of circular causality. In Proc. ICDCIT, 2015
  15. P. Di Giamberardino and U. Dal Lago. On Session Types and Polynomial Time. In Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, 2015.
  16. F. Gadducci, F. Santini, L.F. Pino, F.D. Valencia. A labelled semantics for Soft Concurrent Constraint Programming. In Proc. COORDINATION, 2015
  17. R. Saia, L. Boratto, S. Carta. A New Perspective on Recommender Systems: a Class Path Information Model. In Proceedings of the Science and Information Conference (SAI), 2015.
  18. R. Saia, L. Boratto, S. Carta. A Latent Semantic Pattern Recognition Strategy for an Untrivial Targeted Advertising. In proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Congress on BigData (BigData), 2015.
  19. R. Saia, L. Boratto, S. Carta. Popularity Does Not Always Mean Triviality: Introduction of Popularity Criteria to Improve the Accuracy of a Recommender System. Accepted for publication in Journal of Computers (JCP), 2015.
  20. R. Saia, L. Boratto, S. Carta. Exploiting the Evaluation Frequency of the Items to Enhance the Recommendation Accuracy. In proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Applications & Technology (ICCAT), 2015.
  21. R. Saia, L. Boratto, S. Carta. A Class-based Strategy to User Behavior Modeling. Accepted for publication in Studies in computational intelligence, Springer (SCI), 2015.
  22. R. Saia, L. Boratto, S. Carta. A Proactive Time-frame Convolution Vector (TFCV) Technique to Detect Frauds Attempts in E-commerce Transactions. Accepted for publication in International Journal of e-Education, e-Business, e-Management and e-Learning (IJEEEE), 2015.
  23. R. Saia, L. Boratto, S. Carta. Introducing a Weighted Ontology to Improve the Graph-based Semantic Similarity Measures. Accepted for publication in International Journal of Signal Processing Systems (IJSPS), 2015.
  24. R. Saia, L. Boratto, S. Carta. Multiple Behavioral Models: a Divide and Conquer Strategy to Fraud Detection in Financial Data Streams. In proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval (KDIR), 2015.

2014

  1. M. Bartoletti, T. Cimoli, G.M. Pinna and R. Zunino. Circular causality in event structures. In Fundamenta Informaticae 134(3-4), 2014.
  2. M. Bartoletti, A. Scalas, R. Zunino. A semantic deconstruction of session types. In Proc. CONCUR, 2014.
  3. M. Bartoletti, T. Cimoli, G.M. Pinna. A note on two notions of compliance. In Proc. ICE, 2014.
  4. M. Bartoletti, M. Murgia, A. Scalas, R. Zunino. Modelling and verifying contract-oriented systems in Maude. In Proc. WRLA, 2014.
  5. G. Casu, G. M. Pinna. Flow unfolding of multi-clock nets. In Proc. Petri Nets, 2014.
  6. L. Boratto and S. Carta. Using Collaborative Filtering to Overcome the Curse of Dimensionality when Clustering Users in a Group Recommender System. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS), 2014.
  7. M. Manca, L. Boratto, and S. Carta. Design and Architecture of a Friend Recommender System in the Social Bookmarking Domain. In Proceedings of the Science and Information Conference 2014, 2014.
  8. R. Saia, L. Boratto, S. Carta. Semantic Coherence-based User Profile Modeling in the Recommender Systems Context. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval (KDIR), 2014.

2013

  1. M. Bartoletti, T. Cimoli and R. Zunino. A theory of agreements and protection. In Proc. POST, 2013.
  2. M. Bartoletti, A. Scalas, E. Tuosto, R. Zunino. Honesty by typing. In Proc. FMOODS-FORTE, 2013.
  3. M. Bartoletti, T. Cimoli and G.M. Pinna. Lending Petri nets and contracts. In Proc. FSEN, 2013.
  4. M. Bartoletti, T. Cimoli, P. Di Giamberardino and R. Zunino. Contract agreements via logic. In Proc. ICE, 2013.
  5. J. Lange and A. Scalas. Choreography synthesis as contract agreement. In Proc. ICE, 2013.
  6. L. Boratto, S. Carta, M. Manca, F. Mulas, P. Pilloni, G.M. Pinna, and E. Vargiu. A Clustering Approach for Tag Recommendation in Social Environments. International Journal of E-Business Development, 3(3), 2013.
  7. P. Pilloni, F.Mulas, L. Piredda, and S. Carta. How User Experience Design Can Affect Motivation: A Study on a Real World Sport Application. In Proc. 3rd Int. Conf. on Social Eco-Informatics (SOTICS), 2013.
  8. P. Pilloni, F.Mulas, L. Piredda, and S. Carta. Assessing the User Experience Design as a Persuasive Methodology in a Real World Sport Application. In Proc. 11th Int. Conf. on Advances in Mobile Computing & Multimedia (MoMM), 2013.
  9. L. Boratto and S. Carta. Exploring the Ratings Prediction Task in a Group Recommender System that Automatically Detects Groups. In Proc. IMMM 2013, 3rd Int. Conf. on Advances in Information Mining and Management, 2013.
  10. M. Manca, L. Boratto and S. Carta. Producing Friend Recommendations in a Social Bookmarking System by Mining Users Content. In Proc. IMMM 2013, 3rd Int. Conf. on Advances in Information Mining and Management, 2013.
  11. F. Mulas, P. Pilloni, M. Manca, L. Boratto, S. Carta. Linking Human-Computer Interaction with the Social Web: a Web Application to Improve Motivation in the Exercising Activity of Users. In Proc. 4th IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Infocommunicaitons (CogInfoCom'13), 2013.
  12. F. Mulas, P. Pilloni, M. Manca, L. Boratto, S. Carta. Using New Communication Technologies and Social Media Interaction to Improve the Motivation of Users to Exercise. In Proc. 2nd Int. Conf. on Future Generation Communication Technologies (FGCT 2013), 2013.