Steve Webb

Steve Webb, Ph.D.

College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332

Email: webb [AT] cc [DOT] gatech [DOT] edu

[ Welcome ] [ Biography ] [ Publications ] [ Presentations ]

Welcome

Thanks for stopping by! If you are looking for Steve Webb, the hockey player, or Steve Webb, the politician, you have gone too far down the Google rankings (and not far enough down the Yahoo! rankings). But don't panic... I am just as exciting as those other guys (if not more so).

Regardless of how you got here, feel free to look around. If you are interested in my previous research, please scroll down to find a list of my publications. If you are a Web spam researcher, you might be interested in the Webb Spam Corpus -- a publicly available collection of almost 350,000 Web spam pages.

Biography

Dr. Steve Webb is a research scientist at Purewire, Inc. and the chief architect of PurewireTrust.org, a free online portal that maintains portable reputations for people, places, and things. Dr. Webb has 10 years of experience in researching security threats that target information systems such as P2P networks, email systems, the World Wide Web, and social networking environments. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he published more than a dozen academic articles on various information security and privacy issues, including spam, phishing, and information warfare. Dr. Webb has presented work at top conferences such as CIKM, CEAS, and CollaborateCom, and he has served as a reviewer for world renowned publications such as IEEE Computer magazine, TKDE and TPDS.

Publications

  • D. Irani, Steve Webb, K. Li, and C. Pu, "Large Online Social Footprints - An Emerging Threat," in Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Scientific and Engineering Computing (SEC 2009), August 29-31, 2009, Vancouver, Canada.

  • B. Byun, C. Lee, Steve Webb, D. Irani, and C. Pu, "An Incremental Anti-Spam Filter Combination Framework for Text-and-Image Emails," in Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS 2009), July 16-17, 2009, Mountain View, CA.

  • Steve Webb, "Automatic Identification and Removal of Low Quality Online Information," Ph.D. Dissertation, Georgia Institute of Technology, December 2008.

  • Steve Webb, J. Caverlee, and C. Pu, "Predicting Web Spam with HTTP Session Information," in Proceedings of the Seventeenth Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2008), October 26-30, 2008, Napa Valley, CA. [ pdf ]

  • D. Irani, Steve Webb, J. Giffin, and C. Pu, "Evolutionary Study of Phishing," (Best Paper Award) in Proceedings of the Third Anti-Phishing Working Group eCrime Researchers Summit (eCrime 2008), October 15-16, 2008, Atlanta, GA.

  • Steve Webb, J. Caverlee, and C. Pu, "Social Honeypots: Making Friends with a Spammer Near You," in Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS 2008), August 21-22, 2008, Mountain View, CA. [ pdf ]

  • J. Caverlee, L. Liu, and Steve Webb, "SocialTrust: Tamper-Resilient Trust Establishment in Online Communities," in Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2008), June 16-20, 2008, Pittsburgh, PA. [ pdf ]

  • J. Caverlee and Steve Webb, "A Large-Scale Study of MySpace: Observations and Implications for Online Social Networks," in Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2008), March 30 - April 2, 2008, Seattle, WA. [ pdf ]

  • Steve Webb, J. Caverlee, and C. Pu, "Characterizing Web Spam Using Content and HTTP Session Analysis," in Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS 2007), August 2-3, 2007, Mountain View, CA. [ pdf ]

  • B. Byun, C. Lee, Steve Webb, and C. Pu, "A Discriminative Classifier Learning Approach to Image Modeling and Spam Image Identification," in Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS 2007), August 2-3, 2007, Mountain View, CA. [ pdf ]

  • J. Caverlee, Steve Webb, and L. Liu, "Spam-Resilient Web Rankings via Influence Throttling," in Proceedings of the 21st IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2007), March 26-30, 2007, Long Beach, CA. [ pdf ]

  • Steve Webb, J. Caverlee, and C. Pu, "Introducing the Webb Spam Corpus: Using Email Spam to Identify Web Spam Automatically," in Proceedings of the Third Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS 2006), July 27-28, 2006, Mountain View, CA. [ pdf ]

    Note: The Webb Spam Corpus can be found here.

  • C. Pu and Steve Webb, "Observed Trends in Spam Construction Techniques: A Case Study of Spam Evolution," in Proceedings of the Third Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS 2006), July 27-28, 2006, Mountain View, CA. [ pdf ]

  • C. Pu, Steve Webb, O. Kolesnikov, W. Lee, and R. Lipton, "Towards the Integration of Diverse Spam Filtering Techniques," in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Granular Computing (GrC 2006), May 10-12, 2006, Atlanta, GA. [ pdf ]

  • Steve Webb, S. Chitti, and C. Pu, "An Experimental Evaluation of Spam Filter Performance and Robustness Against Attack," in Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing (CollaborateCom 2005), Dec. 19-21, 2005, San Jose, CA. [ pdf ]

  • K. Li, S. Ding, D. McCreary, and Steve Webb, "Analysis of State Exposure Control to Prevent Cheating in Online Games," in Proceedings of the ACM Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video 2004 (NOSSDAV 2004), June 16-18, 2004, Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland. [ pdf ]

  • Steve Webb, "Hacking the Gnutella Protocol," Undergraduate Honors Thesis, Baylor University, May 2003.

Presentations

  • "Predicting Web Spam with HTTP Session Information," presented at the Seventeenth Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2008), October 26-30, 2008, Napa Valley, CA.

  • "Social Honeypots: Making Friends with a Spammer Near You," presented at the Fifth Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS 2008), August 21-22, 2008, Mountain View, CA.

  • "Characterizing Web Spam Using Content and HTTP Session Analysis," presented at the Fourth Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS 2007), August 2-3, 2007, Mountain View, CA.

  • "Introducing the Webb Spam Corpus: Using Email Spam to Identify Web Spam Automatically," presented at the Third Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS 2006), July 27-28, 2006, Mountain View, CA.

  • "Observed Trends in Spam Construction Techniques: A Case Study of Spam Evolution," presented at the Third Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS 2006), July 27-28, 2006, Mountain View, CA.

  • "An Experimental Evaluation of Spam Filter Performance and Robustness Against Attack," presented at the 1st International Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing (CollaborateCom 2005), Dec. 19-21, 2005, San Jose, CA.

  • "Towards the Integration of Diverse Spam Filtering Techniques," presented at the Adaptive and Resilient Computing Security Workshop 2005 (ARCS 2005), Nov. 2-3, 2005, Santa Fe, NM.