Effective hate-speech detection in Twitter data using recurrent neural networks Georgios K. Pitsilis, Heri Ramampiaro, Helge Langseth Applied Intelligence, 2018 This paper addresses the important problem of discerning hateful content in social media. We propose a detection scheme that is an ensemble of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) classifiers, and it incorporates various features associated with userrelated information, such as the users’ tendency towards racism or sexism. These data are fed as input to the above classifiers along with the word frequency vectors derived from the textual content. Our approach has been evaluated on a publicly available corpus of 16k tweets, and the results demonstrate its effectiveness in comparison to existing state of the art solutions. More specifically, our scheme can successfully distinguish racism and sexism messages from normal text, and achieve higher classification quality than current state-of-the-art algorithms.
Abstracting massive data for lightweight intrusion detection in computer networks Wei Wang, Jiqiang Liu, Georgios Pitsilis, Xiangliang Zhang Information Sciences, 2018 Anomaly intrusion detection in big data environments calls for lightweight models that are able to achieve real-time performance during detection. Abstracting audit data provides a solution to improve the efficiency of data processing in intrusion detection. Data abstraction refers to abstract or extract the most relevant information from the massive dataset. In this work, we propose three strategies of data abstraction, namely, exemplar extraction, attribute selection and attribute abstraction. We first propose an effective method called exemplar extraction to extract representative subsets from the original massive data prior to building the detection models. Two clustering algorithms, Affinity Propagation (AP) and traditional k-means, are employed to find the exemplars from the audit data. k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN), Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and one-class Support Vector Machine (SVM) are used for the detection. We then employ another two strategies, attribute selection and attribute extraction, to abstract audit data for anomaly intrusion detection. Two http streams collected from a real computing environment as well as the KDD’99 benchmark data set are used to validate these three strategies of data abstraction. The comprehensive experimental results show that while all the three strategies improve the detection efficiency, the AP-based exemplar extraction achieves the best performance of data abstraction.
Harnessing the power of social bookmarking for improving tag-based recommendations Georgios Pitsilis, Wei Wang Computers in Human Behavior, 2015 Used the collaborative tagging idea to produce personalized recommendations.Attempted utilization of the power of taxonomies through clustering of annotations.Experimental evaluation of the model using data from public annotation system, citeUlike.The approach improved prediction quality without compromising computational efficiency. Social bookmarking and tagging has emerged a new era in user collaboration. Collaborative Tagging allows users to annotate content of their liking, which via the appropriate algorithms can render useful for the provision of product recommendations. It is the case today for tag-based algorithms to work complementary to rating-based recommendation mechanisms to predict the user liking to various products. In this paper we propose an alternative algorithm for computing personalized recommendations of products, that uses exclusively the tags provided by the users. Our approach is based on the idea of using the semantic similarity of the user-provided tags for clustering them into groups of similar meaning. Afterwards, some measurable characteristics of users' Annotation Competency are combined with other metrics, such as user similarity, for computing predictions. The evaluation on data used from a real-world collaborative tagging system, citeUlike, confirmed that our approach outperforms the baseline Vector Space model, as well as other state of the art algorithms, predicting the user liking more accurately.
Securing recommender systems against shilling attacks using social-based clustering Xiang-Liang Zhang, Tak Man Desmond Lee, Georgios Pitsilis Journal of Computer Science and Technology, 2013 Recommender systems (RS) have been found supportive and practical in e-commerce and been established as useful aiding services. Despite their great adoption in the user communities, RS are still vulnerable to unscrupulous producers who try to promote their products by shilling the systems. With the advent of social networks new sources of information have been made available which can potentially render RS more resistant to attacks. In this paper we explore the information provided in the form of social links with clustering for diminishing the impact of attacks. We propose two algorithms, CluTr and WCluTr, to combine clustering with \\trust" among users. We demonstrate that CluTr and WCluTr enhance the robustness of RS by experimentally evaluating them on data from a public consumer recommender system Epinions.com.
An efficient authorship protection scheme for shared multimedia content Mohamed El-Hadedy, Georgios Pitsilis, Svein J. Knapskog Proceedings 6th International Conference on Image and Graphics Icig 2011, 2011 Many electronic content providers today like Flickr and Google, offer space to users to publish their electronic media(e.g. photos and videos) in their cloud infrastructures so that they can be publicly accessed. Features like including other information, such as keywords or owner information into the digital material is already offered by existing providers. Despite the useful features made available to users by such infrastructures, the authorship of the published content is not protected against various attacks such as compression. In this paper we propose a robust scheme that uses digital invisible watermarking and hashing to protect the authorship of the digital content and provide resistance against malicious manipulation of multimedia content. The scheme is enhanced by an algorithm called MMBEC, that is an extension of an established scheme MBEC towards higher resistance.
Exploring the use of explicit trust links for filtering recommenders: A study on epinions.com Pern Hui Chia, Georgios Pitsilis Journal of Information Processing, 2011 The majority of recommender systems predict user preferences by relating users with similar attributes or taste. Prior research has shown that trust networks improve the accuracy of recommender systems, predominantly using algorithms devised by individual researchers. In this work, omitting any specific trust inference algorithm, we investigate how useful it might be if explicit trust relationships are used to select the best neighbors or predictors, to generate accurate recommendations. We conducted a series of evaluations using data from Epinions.com, a popular collaborative reviewing system. We find that, for highly active users, using trusted sources as predictors does not give more accurate recommendations compared to the classic similarity-based collaborative filtering scheme, except in improving the precision to recommend items that are of users' liking. This cautions against the intuition that inputs from trusted sources would always be more accurate or helpful. The use of explicit trust links, however, provides a slight gain in prediction accuracy when it comes to the less active users. These findings highlight the need and potential to adapt the use of trust information for different groups of users, besides to better understand trust when employing it in the recommender systems. Parallel to the trust criterion, we also investigated the effects of requiring the candidate predictors to have an equal or higher experience level.
Clustering recommenders in collaborative filtering using explicit trust information Georgios Pitsilis, Xiangliang Zhang, Wei Wang IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 2011 In this work, we explore the benefits of combining clustering and social trust information for Recommender Systems. We demonstrate the performance advantages of traditional clustering algorithms like k-Means and we explore the use of new ones like Affinity Propagation (AP). Contrary to what has been used before, we investigate possible ways that social-oriented information like explicit trust could be exploited with AP for forming clusters of high quality. We conducted a series of evaluation tests using data from a real Recommender system Epinions.com from which we derived conclusions about the usefulness of trust information in forming clusters of Recommenders. Moreover, from our results we conclude that the potential advantages in using clustering can be enlarged by making use of the information that Social Networks can provide.
Abstracting audit data for lightweight intrusion detection Wei Wang, Xiangliang Zhang, Georgios Pitsilis Lecture Notes in Computer Science Including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics, 2010 High speed of processing massive audit data is crucial for an anomaly Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to achieve real-time performance during the detection. Abstracting audit data is a potential solution to improve the efficiency of data processing. In this work, we propose two strategies of data abstraction in order to build a lightweight detection model. The first strategy is exemplar extraction and the second is attribute abstraction. Two clustering algorithms, Affinity Propagation (AP) as well as traditional k-means, are employed to extract the exemplars, and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is employed to abstract important attributes (a.k.a. features) from the audit data. Real HTTP traffic data collected in our institute as well as KDD 1999 data are used to validate the two strategies of data abstraction. The extensive test results show that the process of exemplar extraction significantly improves the detection efficiency and has a better detection performance than PCA in data abstraction.
Does trust matter for user preferences? A study on epinions ratings Georgios Pitsilis, Pern Hui Chia IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 2010 Recommender systems have evolved during the last few years into useful online tools for assisting the daily e-commerce activities. The majority of recommender systems predict user preferences relating users with similar taste. Prior research has shown that trust networks improve the performance of recommender systems, predominantly using algorithms devised by individual researchers. In this work, omitting any specific trust inference algorithm, we investigate how useful it might be if explicit trust relationships (expressed by users for others) are used to select the best neighbours (or predictors), for the provision of accurate recommendations. We conducted our experiments using data from Epinions.com, a popular recommender system. Our analysis indicates that trust information can be helpful to provide a slight performance gain in a few cases especially when it comes to the less active users.
Social trust as a solution to address sparsity-inherent problems of recommender systems Ceur Workshop Proceedings, 2009
A Trust-enabled P2P recommender system Georgios Pitsilis, Lindsay Marshall Proceedings of the Workshop on Enabling Technologies Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises Wetice, 2006
A policy for electing super-nodes in unstructured P2P networks Georgios Pitsilis, Panayiotis Periorellis, Lindsay Marshall Lecture Notes in Computer Science Including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics, 2005
AGRISIM: A PC user-friendly transient simulation program for growing-finishing swine buildings Applied Engineering in Agriculture, 1994
RECENT SCHOLAR PUBLICATIONS
Improved two-stage hate speech classification for twitter based on Deep Neural Networks GK Pitsilis arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.04162 , 2022 2022
Securing Tag-based recommender systems against profile injection attacks: A comparative study. (Extended Report) GK Pitsilis, H Ramampiaro, H Langseth https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.08422.pdf , 2019 2019 Citations: 3
Effective hate-speech detection in Twitter data using recurrent neural networks GK Pitsilis, H Ramampiaro, H Langseth Applied Intelligence 48 (12), 4730-4742 , 2018 2018 Citations: 358
Securing Tag-based recommender systems against profile injection attacks: A comparative study. GK Pitsilis, H Ramampiaro, H Langseth LBRS@RecSys ’18, Vancouver, BC, Canada : arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.10550 , 2018 2018 Citations: 3
Abstracting massive data for lightweight intrusion detection in computer networks W Wang, J Liu, G Pitsilis, X Zhang Information Sciences 433, 417-430 , 2018 2018 Citations: 89
Detecting offensive language in tweets using deep learning GK Pitsilis, H Ramampiaro, H Langseth arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.04433 , 2018 2018 Citations: 173
Detecting offensive language in tweets using deep learning KP Georgios, H Ramampiaro, H Langseth arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.04433, 1-17 , 2018 2018 Citations: 70
Posting with credibility in Micro-blogging systems using Digital Signatures and Watermarks: A case study on Twitter GK Pitsilis, M El-Hadedy arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.09480 , 2016 2016 Citations: 1
Harnessing the power of social bookmarking for improving tag-based recommendations G Pitsilis, W Wang Computers in Human Behavior 50, 239-251 , 2015 2015 Citations: 14
Securing recommender systems against shilling attacks using social-based clustering XL Zhang, TMD Lee, G Pitsilis Journal of Computer Science and Technology 28, 616-624 , 2013 2013 Citations: 33
Social Trust as a solution to address sparsity-inherent problems of Recommender systems G Pitsilis, SJ Knapskog arXiv preprint arXiv:1208.1004 , 2012 2012 Citations: 60
Building Robust Recommender Systems Using Social-based Clustering X Zhang, TM Desmond-Lee, G Pitsilis EDB 2012, 4th International Conference on Emerging Databases, Technologies … , 2012 2012
An efficient authorship protection scheme for shared multimedia content M El-Hadedy, G Pitsilis, SJ Knapskog 2011 Sixth International Conference on Image and Graphics, 914-919 , 2011 2011 Citations: 4
Clustering Recommenders in Collaborative Filtering Using Explicit Trust Information G Pitsilis, X Zhang, W Wang Trust Management V, 82-97 , 2011 2011 Citations: 47
Exploring the use of explicit trust links for filtering recommenders: a study on epinions. com PH Chia, G Pitsilis Journal of information processing 19 (Special Issue on Trust Management … , 2011 2011 Citations: 10
Abstracting audit data for lightweight intrusion detection W Wang, X Zhang, G Pitsilis Information Systems Security, 201-215 , 2011 2011 Citations: 11
Does Trust Matter for User Preferences? A Study on Epinions Ratings G Pitsilis, P Chia Trust Management IV, 232-247 , 2010 2010 Citations: 9
Social Trust as a solution to address sparsity-inherent problems of Recommender systems GK Pitsilis, SJ Knapskog RSWeb Workshop: 3rd ACM Conference on Recommender Systems RecSys'2009 531 … , 2009 2009 Citations: 60
Trust-enhanced Recommender Systems for efficient on-line collaboration GK Pitsilis IFIP International Conference on Trust Management, 30-46 , 2009 2009
Cloud Computing for e-Science with CARMEN P Watson, P Lord, F Gibson, P Periorellis, G Pitsilis Proceedings of the 2nd Iberian Grid Infrastructure Conference Proceedings … , 2008 2008 Citations: 90
MOST CITED SCHOLAR PUBLICATIONS
Effective hate-speech detection in Twitter data using recurrent neural networks GK Pitsilis, H Ramampiaro, H Langseth Applied Intelligence 48 (12), 4730-4742 , 2018 2018 Citations: 358
Detecting offensive language in tweets using deep learning GK Pitsilis, H Ramampiaro, H Langseth arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.04433 , 2018 2018 Citations: 173
Cloud Computing for e-Science with CARMEN P Watson, P Lord, F Gibson, P Periorellis, G Pitsilis Proceedings of the 2nd Iberian Grid Infrastructure Conference Proceedings … , 2008 2008 Citations: 90
Abstracting massive data for lightweight intrusion detection in computer networks W Wang, J Liu, G Pitsilis, X Zhang Information Sciences 433, 417-430 , 2018 2018 Citations: 89
Detecting offensive language in tweets using deep learning KP Georgios, H Ramampiaro, H Langseth arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.04433, 1-17 , 2018 2018 Citations: 70
Social Trust as a solution to address sparsity-inherent problems of Recommender systems G Pitsilis, SJ Knapskog arXiv preprint arXiv:1208.1004 , 2012 2012 Citations: 60
Social Trust as a solution to address sparsity-inherent problems of Recommender systems GK Pitsilis, SJ Knapskog RSWeb Workshop: 3rd ACM Conference on Recommender Systems RecSys'2009 531 … , 2009 2009 Citations: 60
Clustering Recommenders in Collaborative Filtering Using Explicit Trust Information G Pitsilis, X Zhang, W Wang Trust Management V, 82-97 , 2011 2011 Citations: 47
A model of trust derivation from evidence for use in recommendation systems. G Pitsilis, LF Marshall School of Computer Science; University of Newcastle upon Tyne , 2004 2004 Citations: 40
A model of Trust derivation from Evidence for Use in Recommendation systems G Pitsilis, LF Marshall, UNTC Science University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Computing Science , 2004 2004 Citations: 40
Energy software programs for educational use P Axaopoulos, G Pitsilis Renewable energy 32 (6), 1045-1058 , 2007 2007 Citations: 37
Securing recommender systems against shilling attacks using social-based clustering XL Zhang, TMD Lee, G Pitsilis Journal of Computer Science and Technology 28, 616-624 , 2013 2013 Citations: 33
Trust as a key to improving recommendation systems G Pitsilis, L Marshall International Conference on Trust Management, 210-223 , 2005 2005 Citations: 29
Trust as a key to improving recommendation systems G Pitsilis, L Marshall Trust Management: Third International Conference, iTrust 2005, Paris, France … , 2005 2005 Citations: 29
A trust-enabled P2P recommender system G Pitsilis, L Marshall Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, 2006 … , 2006 2006 Citations: 25
The CARMEN neuroscience server P Watson, T Jackson, G Pitsilis, F Gibson, J Austin, M Fletcher, B Liang, ... UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2007 , 2007 2007 Citations: 20
Modeling trust for recommender systems using similarity metrics G Pitsilis, L Marshall Trust Management II, 103-118 , 2008 2008 Citations: 17
Harnessing the power of social bookmarking for improving tag-based recommendations G Pitsilis, W Wang Computers in Human Behavior 50, 239-251 , 2015 2015 Citations: 14
Agrisim: A PC user-friendly transient simulation program for growing-finishing swine buildings P Axaopoulos, P Panagakis, G Pitsilis, S Kyritsis Applied engineering in agriculture 10 (5), 735-742 , 1994 1994 Citations: 14
A model of trust derivation from evidence for use in recommendation systems. University of Newcastle upon Tyne G Pitsilis, LF Marshall Computing Science , 2004 2004 Citations: 12