background: hospitals have responsibility for responding to legitimate demands for release of health information while protecting the confidentiality of the patient health records. there have always been challenges concerning medical records confidentiality and their disclosure and release type in medical record departments. this study investigated and compared laws and policies of disclosure o...

rumors are part of our everyday life. sometimes they contain confidential information about public figures; in other cases they have hot news concerning important social or economic issues. rumors can shape the public opinion of a society or a market by affecting and coordinating the individual beliefs of its members. rumor is a kind of social phenomenon that a similar remark spreads on a large...

Statistical inference using social sensors is an area that has witnessed remarkable progress in the last decade. It is relevant in a variety of applications including localizing events for targeted advertising, marketing, localization of natural disasters and predicting sentiment of investors in financial markets. This paper presents a tutorial description of three important aspects of sensing-...

In February 2013, during the third quarter of Super Bowl XLVII, a power outage stopped the game for 34 minutes. Oreo, a sandwich cookie company, tweeted during the outage: “Power out? No Problem, You can still dunk it in the dark.” The tweet caught on almost immediately, reaching nearly 15,000 retweets and 20,000 likes on Facebook in less than two days. A simple tweet diffused into a large popu...

Recommender systems have shown great potential in addressing the information overload problem, namely helping users in finding interesting and relevant objects within a huge information space. Some physical dynamics, including the heat conduction process and mass or energy diffusion on networks, have recently found applications in personalized recommendation. Most of the previous studies focus ...

Information diffusion in online social networks has attracted substantial research effort. Although recent models begin to incorporate interactions among contagions, they still don’t consider the comprehensive interactions involving users and contagions as a whole. Moreover, the interactions obtained in previous work are modeled as latent factors and thus are difficult to understand and interpr...