Rethinking Network Structure

The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Kristina Lerman

DATE: Friday, December 16th, 2011
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room A34, Red building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 13.30

ABSTRACT:
Network analysis algorithms examine connectivity between nodes in a network to discover central nodes within it, measure their tie strength, or identify communities of inter-connected nodes. These algorithms often assume that interactions between nodes can be modeled by a dynamic process such as the random walk. However, this assumption may not be appropriate for many social phenomena, including the spread of epidemics, viral marketing campaigns, and information diffusion. I argue that rather than simply looking at connectivity, network analysis must also take into account the nature of interactions between nodes. I show that metrics that properly account for the interactions lead to empirically better predictions about network structure than popular metrics, such as PageRank.

BIO:
Kristina Lerman is a Project Leader at the USC Information Sciences Institute and holds a joint appointment as a Research Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at University of Southern California. She joined ISI in 1998, shortly after receiving a Ph.D. in physics from University of California at Santa Barbara. Her research builds on the fascination with complex systems she developed at UCSB, which she applies to the study of complex networks and social dynamics of social media.

HOST: Prof. Fabio Crestani