Recently, we have seen a rapid growth of social networking systems (SNSs). In most SNSs, a user can configure his privacy settings to indicate who can or cannot see his friend list. Usually, SNSs, such as LinkedIn and Google Plus, also include a feature that allows a user to query mutual friends between him and any other user he can reach using the available public search feature in SNSs. While...

While direct social ties have been intensely studied in the context of computer-mediated social networks, indirect ties (e.g., friends of friends) have seen little attention. Yet in real life, we often rely on friends of our friends for recommendations (of good doctors, good schools, or good babysitters), for introduction to a new job opportunity, and for many other occasional needs. In this wo...

This paper analyzes the determinants of successful participation of candidates on the well known television quiz show “WhoWants to Be a Millionaire?”. Our study includes a survey of 660 contestants who participated in the German version of the show between 1999 and 2007. We are particularly interested in two hypotheses. The first hypothesis refers to the assumed advantage of social capital. Con...

We address the problem of describing, recognizing, and learning generic, free-form objects in real-world scenes. We introduce a hybrid appearance-based approach, IDEAL, where objects are encoded as a loose collections of parts and the relations between them. The key features of this new approach are the structural part decomposition combining multi-scale wavelet segmentation and hierarchical bl...

Geocast mechanisms allow a sender to transmit network packets to receivers residing at a certain geographical region. Geocast forms the basis for a number of location-based services, such as announcement services, advertisement services or friend-finders. In this paper, we introduce the notion of semantic geocast, where a target area is specified by its meaning. A sender can broadcast messages ...

The present study adopted a reward-priming paradigm to investigate whether and how monetary reward cues affected self-face processing. Event-related potentials were recorded during judgments of head orientation of target faces (self, friend, and stranger), with performance associated with a monetary reward. The results showed self-faces elicited larger N2 mean amplitudes than other-faces, and m...