mindspill

ASONAM 2011 - Summary

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 14:49:41 GMT

This year the 3rd conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining was held in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Kaohsiung is the 2nd largest city in Taiwan with around 2.9 million inhabitants. During my short stay there I couldn't help but notice that Taiwan (or at least Kaohsiung) is a blend of Japanese efficiency and cleanliness, with Chinese culture and influences.

The organisation of the conference was impeccable. Everything functioned perfectly, the internet always worked, the guests were well looked after and the presentations all went smoothly. Lunch boxes were provided everyday and the two dinners provided, particularly the banquet served on the 41 floor of Kaohsiung's highest building, the Tuntex Sky Tower (an 85 story skyscraper), was exquisite. The real motor behind the organisation were the student helpers directed by I-Hsien Ting. The students were omnipresent, ever smiling and always ready to help. A truly good job.

These are some noteworthy papers that I came across during the conference (mainly through the sessions I sat through). This is not an exhaustive list by any means. For more information and a summary of each paper consult the conference program on the ASONAM 2011 website.

Matteo Magnani and Luca Rossi. The ML-model for multi-layer social networks. - In one of the best papers in the conference, the authors propose a model to combine the various heterogeneous online personas in a unified network perspective. I believe that the topic of multi layer networks will receive a lot of attention in the near future, making this paper particularly relevant at this point in time.

Chien-Tung Ho, et al. Modeling and Visualizing Information Propagation in a Micro-blogging Platform. - This is another best paper award winner exploring information propagation in micro-blogging systems (using Plurk). The three research questions explored are:- (1) How to quantify a person’s capability to disseminate ideas via a micro-blog. (2) How to measure the extent of propagation of a concept in a micro-blog. (3) How to demonstrate and visualize information propagation in a microblog.

Iraklis Varlamis and George Tsatsaronis. Visualizing Bibliographic Databases as Graphs and Mining Potential Research Synergies - In this paper the authors use power graphs, a graph lossless compression technique developed for biological networks, to visualise bibliographic networks. I see a lot of potential for power graph visualisation in social networks. This paper is a good idea generator in the visualisation field.

Tomoyuki Yuasa and Susumu Shirayama. - A New Analysis Method for Simulations Using Node Categorizations - This is another interesting paper using visualisation that explores Self Organising Maps to cluster and then visualise similar actors in a network.

Juan Lang and Felix Wu. Social Network User Lifetime. - The key question explored in this research is 'what keeps users engaged and active in social networking sites'.

Michael Farrugia, Neil Hurley and Aaron Quigley. SNAP: Towards a validation of the Social Network Assembly Pipeline. - Some shameless self-promotion here. The main theme of this work is how can we collect a ground truth dataset to validate our social network inference method from electronic data.

Marina Danilevsky et al. SCENE: Structural Conversation Evolution NEtwork - Can you identify someone based on the change in his communication pattern while chatting to someone else? A very interesting question studied using IM data, with initial promising results.

Fergal Reid, Aaron McDaid, Neil Hurley. Partitioning Breaks Communities. - Is a non-overlapping or an overlapping community detection approach for clustering a graph? In this paper the authors use the measure of 'breaking cliques' to evaluate different community detection algorithms on various datasets.

Charles Perez et al SPOT 1.0: Scoring Suspicious Profiles On Twitter - Beyond the great title this paper analyses tweet content to identify suspicious profiles. Interesting analysis.

The conference had also 6 interesting keynote speakers. Two of the keynotes by Arno Reuser and Johnny Engell-Hansen were related to open source intelligence and how social networks can help intelligence services. Philippa Pattison presented research on statistical models (ERGMs). Yutaka Matsuo discussed web mining to develop personal search engines. The prolific author Jiawei Han gave a summary of work from his research group in Illinois on data mining algorithms. The last keynote was by Ming-Syan Chen on information processing in social networks.

Some pictures of the conference are already uploaded on the conference Facebook page

Next year the conference is in Istanbul, Turkey

The strengthof weak ties (in summary)

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 23:32:25 GMT

jill/txt has a brief summary of the seminal paper "The Strength of Weak Ties" by Mark Granovetter. To quote part of the text:-

"It’s really unlikely that A knows C and A knows B but B and C don’t know each other, at any rate if A is pretty good friends with both B and C: B and C will probably know each other too.

If A needs a job, she’ll ask B and C. They probably won’t have any new information, because A already shares most of the information that B and C have. There’s a far greater chance A will get new information — for instance about a job that might suit A — from her weak ties, that is from aquaintances and people that she doesn’t see very often. The greater social distance between A and D means that D knows more things that A doesn’t already know.

Weak ties also important because they work as bridges between social groups. People who are bridges between two groups may appear to be socially isolated but actually have weak ties with two or more groups which gives them very early access to new information.

Why do people use facebook (and other social networking sites)

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:53:11 GMT

The article on facebook that appeared in the guardian has generated some interesting discussion in the INSNA mailing list this week. The most interesting point was made by danah boyd about the different types of people who use facebook. I've been thinking about this question myself and she summed it up very nicely. This is the explanation she used:-

teens because they're not allowed out of the house to hang out with their friends and if they are, their friends aren't or they have to go to highly regulated and supervised settings
college students because they know that they're supposed to be in class/doing homework/sleeping, but they're procrastinating because talking to friends is much more fun and a little bit of low-level talking through FB can be justified far better than meeting up with someone for a coffee
white collar workers because they're bored at work and want to hang out with their friends when they should be doing a variety of other things
nightshift/hourly service workers because their friends work different hours
parents at home because they can't really go and hang out with their friends because babysitting costs too bloody much
highly mobile adults and military folks because their friends are far away, probably in a different timezone and getting together in person can only take place sporadically

In a separate related post on the topic she explained two organizing principles of online socializing practices:-

What we've found in our research is that there are two organizing principles of online socializing practices: interest-driven and friend-driven. People who are interest-driven (lovingly called "geeks") seek out people who share their passions, regardless of location, and thrive on access to the technologies that connect them more broadly to others of their stripe. As much as we'd love for this to be everyone, it's not... Most people are not primarily interest-driven in their social practices, although many have a portion of their social practices that fit into this category. The majority of people and the majority of practices are friend-driven. This means that interests are derived through friends, not the other way around. This is why most people go online to connect to people that they already know to reinforce relationships that they already have. At best, this cohort will leverage the technology to meet a friend of a friend (just like at a good dinner party).

The largest exception is quite obvious: sex. By and large, when people leverage the technology for sex, they don't want to engage with people that they already know. The second notable exception is more intriguing: health issues. Interestingly, even the most friend-driven people seem to switch to interest-driven practices when it comes to needing support for an illness or help in gaining information around said illness. It should be noted that these are not common amongst teens and interest-driven practices are almost exclusively the domain of geeks and other socially marginalized and ostracized teens.

I took the liberty of quoting the whole parts of the e-mail as it will be available in the INSNA archives anyway.

Is facebook a threat to Google? What do you think?

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 06:36:06 GMT

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg was on the CBS program 60 minutes recently. The footage showed some clips of the facebook offices that look very much like a dorm, as Zuckerberg himself says.

One of the opinionists in the feature said that facebook might become a threat to Google. I think this idea is a bit far fetched. Unlike facebook, Google solves a very distinct and important need on the internet - the need to find information. While Facebook's role as an aid to social interaction is currently very popular, this human requirement can be fulfilled without the use of facebook (Instant Messaging, email etc), as well as without the use of the internet entirely.

On a different note but still on the topic of facebook, the guardian had an article on the politics of the people behind the site. Some of them are also part of the Paypal Mafia.

Which is the most popular social network site in your country?

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 01:14:28 GMT

The numbers speak for themselves – Social Networking Sites are popular all over the world.

In 90 (79%) countries a major social networking site features in the top 10 sites of that country.
In 19 of these countries, the social networking site is the highest ranking site in the country – ranking higher than any search engine.
From a sample of 116 countries only 2 (Taiwan and Vietnam) didn’t include a popular social networking site in the list of the top 100 websites.

The popularity of social networking sites is no surprise, and several statistics (1, 2, 3) have been published about the major social networking sites like facebook and myspace. There are however few reports on the use of these sites by geographic region. The only geographic distributions I came across were from Comscore, the Social Network Sites paper published in JCMC, and ValleyWag .

Using the Many Eyes platform I created three different visualizations of the most popular SN sites used in each country. The data used for determining the country popularity was collected from Alexa ratings. For more information on how the data was extracted see – how to collect geographic website rankings from the internet.

The world map is a colour coded map with each social networking site represented in a different colour. Where data wasn’t available, the country border is not displayed. If you click on a site from the list on the right, the countries that use that site are highlighted.

This second display shows a rectangular table display (treemap) of the data divided either by social networking platform, or by country. To alter between the displays reorder the treemap hierarchy by dragging the ordering on top of the visualization display.

The third visualization shows the ranking of the social network sites, and the number of internet users in each region. In the darker coloured regions, social networking sites ranked higher than other websites. The size of each rectangle is proportional to the number of internet users in the country, the bigger the rectangle, the more users there are.

Which visual representation of the data set do you prefer, and why? Do you think that one of the displays is superior to the others? Can you think of other different ways to present this data graphically? The aim of this exercise is to display some interesting data using Many Eyes and stimulate discussions on the different visualizations and data presented.

If you’d like to voice your comments, comment on the specific visualization by clicking the comment link in the respective visualization. The data used to generate the results is freely accessible on the Many Eyes site. You can use the uploaded data to create other visualizations in Many Eyes. After all, if you reply with a picture it’s like you’re writing a thousand words, isn’t it.

Is facebook just a fad?

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 17:31:01 GMT

TVO (TVOntario) program The Agenda poses a question to the list of panelists: is Facebook is just a fad? The most interesting part of the program was when Nancy Baym, an associate professor of communication studies, is asked what value does she get out of facebook. The three main points she makes are:

Convergence of friendship networks
Lightweight fun way to stay in touch with people
Means of crafting a public persona (gain publicity for yourself)

The other topics discussed are:

The value of the acquisition of a minute part of facebook by Microsoft?
Will Microsoft add a drag to facebook’s rapid development?
How people are using facebook to make money?
The potential of a new advertising platform developed by facebook.
Privacy concerns in facebook and other social networking services

The program starts with an interview with Harvard professor Steven Pinker about the value of swearing in the context of his new book The stuff of thought: Language as a window into human nature. There's also an explanation on where the word spam came from: A Monthy Python sketch.

Content is Dead, Community is King?

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 23:19:40 GMT

That's the provocative title of a webcast seminar about the promises social networking and online communities. Panelists with internet social networking initiatives and moderator Karen Christensen from the Berkshire Publishing Group, discuss the benefits of building communities, the challenges the communities face and the benefit people get from participating in communities. These are some of the questions discussed:-

What’s an optimum, and minimum, size for a vibrant community?
How can we make our communities persistent and sustainable?
How can we manage positive and negative feedback?
What increases the value of a community to its participants?
What social media are appropriate for my business?
Does it really make sense to use existing free social networking communities like Facebook and Second Life?
Can we develop our own unique social networking systems with open source technologies?
What are the five questions we should ask ourselves before starting a social networking project?

History of Social Networking Sites

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 19:48:48 GMT

The October issue of the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication's has a special theme on Social Network Sites (sites ala Facebook, MySpace). The first article by danah m. boyd (all lower case for a reason) and Nicole Ellison, is a good introduction to the topic. It goes back to the development history of social network sites, reviewing some huge failures (Friendster) and the use of different services in different countries.

Facebook Profile Collection

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 05:44:48 GMT

I probably didn't get my gossip fix for the week so tonight I was checking out some profiles on facebook. My facebook profile browsing soon turned into picking out some ridicioulous profiles.

First of all, please, please try to be different. If your friend put up a picture of him drinking alcohol of some sort (something rather lame in the first place), you don't have to follow. All these profile photos where friends of the same person.

So you're looking for a relationship. Fair enough, nothing wrong with that. You've discovered facebook and think it's yet another means to get to your goal. You go through all the pain of setting up a profile, add some friends and then get to the real purpose of your facebook profile. Finding a date. (Don't deny that you use social networking sites to find dates if you're single. I know you do, better admit directly)

In facebook there's a field that helps you proclaim your aim, the looking for field. So you start with setting it to Dating. Then you try to mild it down a bit and add Friendship. Then you try not to be so fickle as aim only for dating, and add A relationship. Maybe stopping her is a good idea, but some people think they can stretch it a bit further. So they add Random Play, kinky. But the cherry on the cake is Whatever I can get. Now I know you're really desperate, and what you really deserve is a dirty midget infested camel.

The best relationship status list though was of this girl. The relationship status was In a relationship and at the same time, she was looking for: A relationship. Man, she sure was relying on the fact that her boyfriend is a total computer illiterate, and has no way to know what was happening behind his back. The cheeky bitch.

You've set your relationship status, and now want to give a sneak peek of what your potential conquest will get. You browse through your never-ending picture library, and painfully select the 3 photos that make you look like Jennifer Lopez better looking cousin. You laid your bait and now you're waiting for somebody to bite.

But hold on, your most considerate friends want to lend their hand in helping you find your prince. So what do they do. They add some pictures from their collection of you, and tag them so that people who browse your profile can see them. Problem is that these pictures aren't what you really call flattering. More likely they're the most embarrassing pictures of you getting drunk, looking horribly wasted, and weighing and extra 20 pound which you have lost by now.

Hint. It's time to change those bastard friends of yours.

Enough about relationship seeking. I actually managed to find a cool application for a change. It's catbook. A facebook for your cats. Think this will be better than my personal facebook page. It's more interesting that's for sure.

And, and, I found a nice picture on Karen's wall. It's called Six Degrees of Separation (Wiki article for explanation)

Social Networks Today

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 01:39:37 GMT

Google cannot tolerate somebody who's more open then them. According to tech crunch "Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data." Pretty interesting isn't it, whatever services they include. Found via ebiquity

Should it be social network or social graph? This argument started by Dave Winer spawned a huge debate around the blogosphere as Techmeme and the morning monkey roundup show.