Community detection is one of the preeminent topics in network analysis. Communities in real-world networks vary in their characteristics, such as their internal cohesion and size. Despite a large variety of methods proposed to detect communities so far, most of existing approaches fall into the category of global approaches. Specifically, these global approaches adapt their detection model focusing on approximating the global structure of the whole network, instead of performing approximation at the communities level. Global techniques tune their parameters to "one size fits all model, so they are quite successful with extracting communities in homogeneous cases but suffer in heterogeneous community size distributions. %Furthermore, majority of existing techniques target extracting disjoint communities. In this paper, we present a stateful diffusion approach (Stad) for community detection that employs diffusion. Stad boosts diffusion with a conductance-based function that acts like a tuning parameter to control the diffusion speed. In contrast to existing diffusion mechanisms which operate with global and fixed speed, Stad introduces stateful diffusion to treat every community individually. Particularly, Stad controls the diffusion speed at node level, such that each node determines the diffusion speed associated with every possible community membership independently. Thus, Stad is able to extract communities more accurately in heterogeneous cases by dropping "one size fits all" model. Furthermore, Stad employs a vertex-centric approach which is fully decentralized and highly scalable, and requires no global knowledge. So as, Stad can be successfully applied in distributed environments, such as large-scale graph processing or decentralized machine learning. The results with both real-world and synthetic datasets show that Stad outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques, not only in the community size scale issue but also by achieving higher accuracy that is twice the accuracy achieved by the state-of-the-art techniques.

Fake accounts in online social networks (OSNs) have known considerable sophistication and are now attempting to gain network trust by infiltrating within honest communities. Honest users have limited perspective on the truthfulness of new online identities requesting their friendship. This facilitates the task of fake accounts in deceiving honest users to befriend them. To address this, we have proposed a model that learns hidden correlations between profile attributes within OSN communities, and exploits them to assist users in estimating the trustworthiness of new profiles. To demonstrate our method, we suggest, in this demo, a game application through which players try to cheat the system and convince nodes in a simulated OSN to befriend them. The game deploys different strategies to challenge the players and to reach the objectives of the demo. These objectives are to make participants aware of how fake accounts can infiltrate within their OSN communities, to demonstrate how our suggested method could aid in mitigating this threat, and to eventually strengthen our model based on the data collected from the moves of the players.

Online Social Networks exploit a lightweight process to identify their users so as to facilitate their fast adoption. However, such convenience comes at the price of making legitimate users subject to different threats created by fake accounts. Therefore, there is a crucial need to empower users with tools helping them in assigning a level of trust to whomever they interact with. To cope with this issue, in this paper we introduce a novel model, DIVa, that leverages on mining techniques to find correlations among user profile attributes. These correlations are discovered not from user population as a whole, but from individual communities, where the correlations are more pronounced. DIVa exploits a decentralized learning approach and ensures privacy preservation as each node in the OSN independently processes its local data and is required to know only its direct neighbors. Extensive experiments using real-world OSN datasets show that DIVa is able to extract fine-grained community-aware correlations among profile attributes with average improvements up to 50% than the global approach.