Exploring the Detection of Geographic Communities, their Evolution and Applications
- Day - Time: 22 July 2013, h.10:30
- Place: Area della Ricerca CNR di Pisa - Room: C-29
Speakers
- Cecilia Mascolo (Cambridge University)
Referent
Abstract
It is well-known that space plays an important role in social networks, with pairs of geographically close individuals being more likely to have a connection than those far apart. However, lack of available data has meant that the spatial properties of larger social groups are as yet less well-understood. Do social communities tend to be geographically tight, even in the age of easy long-distance communication? How is the mobility of individuals and the places they frequent related to the existence of these groups?
Thanks to information about users' fine-grained location from increasingly geographically-aware online social services, we can start to investigate these questions. We will present some results from our initial analysis of the spatial properties of social groups in location based online social networks, and discuss how the answers could not only be interesting from a sociological perspective, but also have potential applications in online social services as mobile computing continues to expand.
Biografia: Dr. Cecilia Mascolo is a Reader in Mobile Systems in the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. Her research interests are in human mobility modeling. She has published in the areas of mobile computing, mobility and social modeling and sensor networking.Cecilia's research is funded by research councils as well as by industry such as Alcatel, Google, Intel, Microsoft and Samsung. Dr Mascolo has served as an organizing and programme committee member of many mobile, sensor systems and networking conferences and workshops including Conext, COSN, KDD, Mobihoc, Mobicom, HotMobile, Percom, Sensys, Ubicomp. She is part of the editorial boards of IEEE Internet Computing, IEEE Pervasive Computing and IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. She is teaching courses on mobile and sensor systems and an MPhil course on social and technological network analysis. More details are available at www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/cm542.