CS&E Seminar: Aris Anagnostopoulos - 21 May 2010 - 12.00 @ Aula Magna
Speaker: Aris Anagnostopoulos, Marie Curie Fellow at DIS
Title: Understanding Users' Behavior in Social Networks
Date: 21 May 2010, 12:00 noon
Location: Aula Magna at DIS
Abstract. In this talk I will present some ongoing work on understanding social network users' behavior. Initially, I will focus on the identification of influence in social-network data. This is a difficult task in general, since there are many other factors such as homophily or unobserved confounding variables that can induce statistical correlation between the actions of friends in a social network. I will present statistical tests that can distinguish between social influence and other sources of social correlation in users' actions, giving theoretical and empirical justification. Next, I will discuss about a popular family of models in social theory for social-network analysis, that of affiliation networks, and formulate how we can identify users' affiliations that induce ties between them.
Aris Anagnostopoulos is a postdoc at the Department of Computer and System Sciences at the Sapienza University of Rome. Before coming to DIS he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Yahoo! Research Labs in Silicon Valley, California. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Brown University. His research focuses on the development of data-mining techniques and on the design and analysis of randomized and approximation algorithms with applications on problems such as web search, social networks, computational advertising, and computer security.
Web page of the Seminars series: http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~seminf/