SODAS Data Discussion 11 November 2022
Copenhagen Center for Social Data Science (SODAS) aspirers to be a resource for all students and researchers at the Faculty of Social Sciences. We therefore invite researchers across the faculty to present ongoing research projects, project applications or just a loose idea that relates to the subject of social data science.
The rules are simple: short research presentations of ten minutes are followed by twenty minutes of debate. No papers will be circulated beforehand, and the presentations cannot be longer than five slides.
Presenter: Peter Gregory Mehler, SODAS, University of Copenhagen
Title: How Robust is Open-Source?: An Analysis of the Global Github Dependency Network
Abstract: In the past decade there have been many large-scale security breaches exposing sensitive information of millions of people to malicious actors. One such venue for potential attack is the world’s largest open-source code repository: Github. We examine the robustness of the open-source ecosystem through a network analysis of the global Github dependency network. Our analysis reveals the weakness of the open-source ecosystem to targeted attacks. This weakness is two-fold; We show the small number of individuals and organizations responsible for safeguarding the open-source ecosystem as well as the ecosystem’s reliance on a few major libraries, indicating large power asymmetries among repositories.
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Presenter: Fernando Bermejo, Executive Director at Media Ecosystems Analysis Group
Title: Media Cloud as a massive open-source collection of news in the open web
Abstract: This talk will provide an overview of the Media Cloud project (mediacloud.org): its history, capabilities, and future trajectory. The project, started at Harvard University over a decade ago, currently holds in its database more that 2 billion news stories, and continues to ingest content from over 60k news sources around the world. Evolving and managing a non-commercial research endeavor of such dimensions, and making it available to researchers, presents a series of significant challenges that will be discussed in the talk.