Hi, my name is Yuhong Liu. I am glad to serve as the new membership chair for IEEE Special Technical Community on Social Networking (STCSN). Below is a brief introduction about my research interests and my thoughts on the social network security field.

I obtained my Ph.D. degree from the Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering Department at the University of Rhode Island (URI) in 2012. And I am currently working as an assistant professor at Penn State Altoona.

My primary research interests include trustworthy computing and security issues on social networking. My work on detecting dishonest ratings/feedbacks and malicious users in online rating systems received the best paper award at the IEEE International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom’10).

As the ubiquitous computing and communication systems have dramatically changed the way people think, work and interact, the social media, which covers a wide range of digital media content such as question-answer databases, digital video, blogging, podcasting, forums, review sites, social networking, mobile phone photography and wikis, is integrating into people’s daily lives. However, due to the anonymity of the online world, one critical concern is the security issue: how can we really trust the online entities? Such security issues have already attracted wide attention and raised great challenges for both academic research and business practice. These challenges include but not limited to:

 ·       1. Untrustworthy information quality. Due to the complexity of individual user behaviors, the quality of the social media can be very diverse. Furthermore, the simplicity of creating and manipulating data has led to an increase of the users’ uncertainty in providing trustworthy information.

       2. Rapid while insecure information dissemination. With the increasing popularity of social networks, the social media is widely shared among friends, which establishes large scale word-of-mouth networks. Such networks can greatly accelerate information dissemination, however, they can also be used by attackers to either retrieve sensitive information or widely distribute malicious information.

          3. Privacy issues. The social media, such as blogs, social websites, digital video, etc., will inevitably expose users’ online behavior trails. Such information can significantly facilitate the research of human user behavior patterns. However, on the other hand, how to protect users’ privacy and to prevent the breach of sensitive information becomes an urgent issue.