Detecting Marionette Microblog Users for Improved Information Credibility

In this paper, we propose to detect a special group of microblog users： the ＂marionette＂ users, who are created or employed by backstage ＂puppeteers＂, either through programs or manually. Unlike normal users that access microblog for information sharing or social communication, the marionette users perform specific tasks to earn financial profits. For example, they follow certain users to increase their ＂statistical popularity＂, or retweet some tweets to amplify their ＂statistical impact＂. The fabricated follower or retweet counts not only mislead normal users to wrong information, but also seriously impair microblog-based applications, such as hot tweets selection and expert finding. In this paper, we study the important problem of detecting marionette users on microblog platforms. This problem is challenging because puppeteers are employing complicated strategies to generate marionette users that present similar behaviors as normal users. To tackle this challenge, we propose to take into account two types of discriminative information： 1） individual user tweeting behavior and 2） the social interactions among users. By integrating both information into a semi-supervised probabilistic model, we can effectively distinguish marionette users from normal ones. By applying the proposed model to one of the most popular microblog platforms （Sina Weibo） in China, we find that the model can detect marionette users with F-measure close to 0.9. In addition, we apply the proposed model to calculate the marionette ratio of the top 200 most followed microbloggers and the top 50 most retweeted posts in Sina Weibo. To accelerate the detecting speed and reduce feature generation cost, we further propose a light-weight model which utilizes fewer features to identify marionettes from retweeters.

Development of Independent Moving Puppet Robot

This paper is about the automation of the marionette performance. A method to solve the problem on the mobility of the automated marionette performance is proposed. Since it is difficult to control the marionette by hands, as an alternative, the automated marionette is studied. However, the automtic marionette performance is limited in the silence and mobility. Therefore, an independent shifter to move freely on the stage is required. The magnetic device which connects the movable robot and the marionette controlling robot is conceived. The magnetic device is improved and applied by considering the features of the marionette robot, which is the irregular movement of the marionette controller and of the parallel limited area. The burden of being trapped on the magnet is minimized by dividing the robot to the upper and lower parts of the marionette performance stage. The direction of the magnet is considered to make the mobile robot to move freely. Thus, the efficiency and safety of the device is confirmed by balancing the strength with the permanent magnet.