The Internet development has somewhat shifted its focus from the end-to-end argument to content-centric, i.e., how to design a scalable
architecture to reliably identify and retrieve the contents we want. On the other hand, social media systems such as Facebook and Twitter have
provided another powerful and influential model for information propagation, which have changed many different aspects of our lives. By participating in online discussions, people exchange opinions on various topics or contents, shape their stances, and gradually build their own characteristics. In this talk, we will present a framework for identifying online user characteristics and understanding the formation of user deliberation and bias in online newsgroups. Under the SINCERE.se (Social Interactive Networks: Conversation Entropy Ranking Engine), we have designed a dynamic user like graph model to recognize user deliberation and bias automatically in online newsgroups. We evaluated our identification results with linguistic features and implemented this model under SINCERE as a real-time service. By applying this model to large online newsgroups, we study the influence of early discussion context on the formation of user characteristics. Based on our analysis results, we will then discuss potential new research directions for future Internet architecture.

Prof. S. Felix Wu has been doing “experimental” system research, i.e., building prototype systems to justify and validate novel architectural concepts. Since 1995, he and his students/postdocs have built many experimental systems in the areas of fault tolerant network, IPSec/VPN security policy, attack source tracing, wireless network security, intrusion detection and response, visual information analytics, and, more recently, future Internet design. An article titled “Networking: Four ways to reinvent the Internet” published in Nature 463 (February 3rd, 2010, by Katharine Gammon) provided a brief but very nice cover about his primary thought on a Social-network-based future Internet architecture. During the past seven years, he has been pretending (and hoping) to know a little bit more about humanity science so he can claim that he is working on multidisciplinary research. He strongly believes that thoroughly considering the factor of human relationships is necessary for any IT innovation. Therefore, his primary research objective, before he retires, is to help and contribute to the information technology advancement that would truly help our human society. As an initial step, he recently released the SINCERE (Social Interactive Networking and Conversation Entropy Ranking Engine, sponsored by NSF) search engine under http://www.sincere.se, which is trying to help our Internet society to discover “interesting/unusual” discussions. Felix received his BS from Tunghai University, Taiwan, in 1985, both MS and PhD from Columbia University in 1989 and 1995, all in Computer Science. He has about 120+ academic publications, which means that he should probably focus much more on the depth and quality. He is currently a Professor with the Computer Science department at UC Davis.