Jun.2011-Nov.2011 Uncovering Online “Crowdturfing” Systems (CurrentLab, UCSB)

1. •Study malicious crowd-sourcing systems where internet users are organized to perform malicious tasks such as creating and spreading spam in social networks, posting fake reviews, fake account registrations, etc. (referenced as “crowdturfing” campaigns) 
   

2. •Measure malicious crowd-sourcing sites in China, US and India, analyze details of campaigns offered in these sites, and evaluate their end-to-end effectiveness by running active, non-malicious campaigns of our own
   

3. •Demonstrate the increasing threat of “crowdturfing” campaigns to online communities such as social networks, both in the US and elsewhere.
   

Nov.2010-Mar.2011 Borealis, Accurate Outdoor AP Location System (LinkLab, UCSB)

1. •Borealis is a system for locating Wifi Access Points (AP) in outdoor environment, using commodity devices (smartphones): accurately determines the direction of AP and guides user to the AP location through very minor measurements.  
   

2. •The insight is that by rotating a wireless receiver (smartphone) around a signal-blocking obstacle (the user’s body), we can effectively emulate the sensitivity and functionality of a directional antenna.
   

3. •A general principle for locating transmitters using signal dips caused by obstacle.
   

Sep.2010-Jan. 2011 Polaris Mobile Social Network (CurrentLab, UCSB)

1. •Polaris is a distributed Online Social Network (OSN) architecture that balances the two extremes in OSN design: privacy preserving and economic feasibility.
   

2. •Use smart phone as user’s identity provider and access control manager, to choose the trustworthy federated service providers for specific social network functionalities (e.g. status updates, photo sharing), enabling fine-grained privacy control.
   

3. •Use emerging standard APIs to build a competitive provider marketplace for different components of the OSN, thus allowing users to perform their own tradeoffs between cost, performance and privacy.
   

4. •Implement Polaris on Android smart phones and develop prototype services based on the standard APIs with ruby on rails, including status, geolocation and photo services

1. •[CS40] Foundations of Computer Science, UC Santa Barbara, (Teaching Assistant), Fall 2010;
   

2. •[CS176B] Network Computing, UC Santa Barbara (Teaching Assistant), Winter 2011;
   

3. •[CS64] Computer Organization, UC Santa Barbara (Teaching Assistant), Spring 2011;
   

4. •[CS276] Graduate Networking, UC, Santa Barbara (Teaching Assistant), Fall 2011;

Apr.2010-Jun.2010, Quality Evaluation of Video Streaming (Technicolor Research, Beijing, China)

In this project, I Implemented the software module for quality evaluation of YUV sequence with Qt C++ and integrated H264 decoder to the software for online video quality analysis.

Sep.2009-Jan.2010, uSD-based Mobile Sink Development (Nokia Research Center, Beijing, China) 

In this project, we established a Wireless Sensor Network Testbed with XMesh Protocol and designed middleware for uSD-based Mobile Sink on the phone.

May.2009-Nov.2009, Experimental Study on Network Coordinate system (Lab of NGN, Tsinghua Univ.)

This project is to discuss the neighbor selection policies for Phoenix Network Coordinate system. Extensive experiments on Planetlab and King show that our Hybrid policy based Phoenix NC system has better performance in the application of Overlay Multicast.

Jul.2009-Aug.2009, RGPS model for web service discovery and composition (Summer Intern, EE, Tsinghua)

The project is part of National Basic Research Program of China (973 program); A platform for web service registration and management is designed to manage open APIs and mesh-ups for the further research of 973.

1. •Excellent student of Electronic Working Technology Practice,Tsinghua University, 2007
   

2. •Scholarship for academic excellence,Tsinghua University 2006~2007
   

3. •Third Prize, the 24th Chinese College Student Physics Contest, 2007

I like basketball, swimming, ping-pong. Big fun of hiking and Photography.

Serf and Turf: Crowdturfing for Fun and Profit

Gang Wang, Christo Wilson, Xiaohan Zhao, Yibo Zhu, Manish Mohanlal, Haitao Zheng and Ben Y. Zhao

To Appear: Proceedings of WWW, France, April 2012.

I am the Antenna: Accurate Outdoor AP Location using Smartphones

Zengbin Zhang, Xia Zhou, Weile Zhang, Yuanyang Zhang, Gang Wang, Ben Y. Zhao and Haitao Zheng;

In Proceedings of MobiCom, Las Vegas,  September 2011. [PDF]

Privacy, Availability and Economics in the Polaris Mobile Social Network

Christo Wilson, Troy Steinbauer, Gang Wang, Alessandra Sala, Haitao Zheng and Ben Y. Zhao

In Proceedings of HotMobile, Phoenix,  March 2011. [PDF]

Experimental Study on Neighbor Selection Policy for Phoenix Network Coordinate System

Gang Wang, Shining Wu, Guodong Wang, Beixing Deng, Xing Li

In Proceedings of 2009 International Workshop on Peer-To-Peer Networking, St.-Petersburg, Russia, 2009. [PDF], [Slides]

1. •Million Dollar Crowdturfing Industry Dupes Social Networks introduces our work in evil crowd-sourcing study. (Check Here)
   

2. •MIT TechReview: “Hidden Industry Dupes Social Media Users”, another article about our evil crowd-sourcing study (Check Here)
   

3. •Boston Globe: “Boston Globe “A dark force, unleashed online”. (Check Here)