BEGIN:VCALENDAR PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook 12.0 MIMEDIR//EN VERSION:2.0 METHOD:PUBLISH X-MS-OLK-FORCEINSPECTOROPEN:TRUE BEGIN:VEVENT CLASS:PUBLIC CREATED:20120205T233946Z DESCRIPTION:Information Diffusion in Online Social Networks: From Analyzing Trends to Stopping Misinformation\n\nSpeaker: Professor Amr El Abbadi\n\n Dept of Computer Science\, University of California\, Santa Barbara\n\nTim e: Friday 9 March\, 4:00-5:00pm\n\nRefreshments will be available from 3:3 0pm\n\nLocation: The University of Sydney\, School of IT Building\n\nLect ure Theatre (Room 123)\, Level 1\n\n\nABSTRACT\n\nSocial networks provide great opportunities for social connection\, learning\, political and socia l change\, as well as individual entertainment and enhancement in a wide v ariety of forms. Online social networks also provide unprecedented amounts of information about social interaction and provide an opportunity to stu dy social interactions on a scale and at a level of detail that has never been possible before. In this talk\, we will consider ways of systematical ly exploring the vast space of on-line social network problems. Namely\, w e will consider three dimensions\; understanding\, managing and reporting on social networks and focus on example studies relating to these dimensio ns.\n\nWe will focus on two applications: limiting the spread of misinform ation in social networks and trend analysis. In the former problem\, we st udy the notion of competing campaigns in a social network\, and explore th e spread of influence in the presence of such competing campaigns. In part icular\, we develop protocols whose goal is to limit the spread of misinfo rmation by identifying a subset of individuals that need to be convinced t o adopt the competing (or "good") campaign so as to minimize the number of people that adopt the "bad" campaign . The second problem is motivated b y the critical role the identification of popular and important topics pla ys in better understanding societal concerns. We propose two novel structu ral trend definitions referred to as "coordinated" and "uncoordinated" tre nds that use friendship information to identify topics that are discussed among clustered and unconnected users respectively. Our analyses and exper iments show that structural trends are significantly different from tradit ional trends and provide new insights into the way people share informatio n online. \n\nThis work was done jointly with Divyakant Agrawal and Ceren Budak.\n\nSPEAKER’S BIOGRAPHY\n\nAmr El Abbadi is a Professor in the Co mputer Science Department at the University of California\, Santa Barbara where he also served as Department Chair from 2007 to 2011. He has been Pr ogram Chair for multiple database and distributed systems conferences\, mo st recently SIGSPATIAL GIS 2010 and ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC ) 2011\, and is also currently a journal editor for The VLDB Journal. He has also served as a board member of the VLDB Endowment from 2002-2008. In 2007\, Prof. El Abbadi received the UCSB Senate Outstanding Mentorship Aw ard for his excellence in mentoring graduate students. Prof. El Abbadi is an ACM Fellow.\n\nLOCATION DETAILS:\nThe School of Information Technologie s is located in the new School of IT Building (J12)\, 1 Cleveland Street a t the eastern end of the Darlington campus of the University of Sydney.\nM aps are available here (see coordinates L25/L26):\n http://db.auth. usyd.edu.au/directories/map/largemap00a.html \n\n DTEND:20120309T060000Z DTSTAMP:20120203T032450Z DTSTART:20120309T050000Z LAST-MODIFIED:20120205T233946Z LOCATION:The University of Sydney\, School of IT Building - Lecture Theatre (Room 123)\, Level 1 PRIORITY:5 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY;LANGUAGE=en-au:Basser Seminar Series\, School of Information Techno logies - Information Diffusion in Online Social Networks: From Analyzing T rends to Stopping Misinformation TRANSP:OPAQUE UID:040000008200E00074C5B7101A82E00800000000E0968B547FE2CC01000000000000000 0100000006E4CB50C7054F24F93333661E0164E9C X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Information D iffusion in Online Social Networks: From Analyzing Trends to Stopping Misi nformation

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< SPAN LANG="en-au">Spea ker: Professor Amr El Abbadi

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Dept of Computer Science\, University of California\, Santa Barbara< SPAN LANG="en-au">

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Time: F riday 9 March\, 4:00-5:00pm

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Refreshments will be available from 3:30pm< /P>\n\n

Location:  The University of Syd ney\, School of IT Building

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Lecture Theatre (Room 123)\, Level 1
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ABSTRACT

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Social networks provide great opportuni ties for social connection\, learning\, political and social change\, as w ell as individual entertainment and enhancement in a wide variety of forms . Online social networks also provide unprecedented amounts of information about social interaction and provide an opportunity to study social inter actions on a scale and at a level of detail that has never been possible b efore. In this talk\, we will consider ways of systematically exploring th e vast space of on-line social network problems. Namely\, we will consider three dimensions\; understanding\, managing and reporting on social netwo rks and focus on example studies relating to these dimensions.< /SPAN>

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We will focus on two appli cations: limiting the spread of misinformation in social networks and tren d analysis. In the former problem\, we study the notion of competing campa igns in a social network\, and explore the spread of influence in the pres ence of such competing campaigns. In particular\, we develop protocols who se goal is to limit the spread of misinformation by identifying a subset o f individuals that need to be convinced to adopt the competing (or "\; good"\;) campaign so as to minimize the number of people that adopt th e "\;bad"\; campaign .  The second problem is motivated by the cr itical role the identification of popular and important topics plays in be tter understanding societal concerns. We propose two novel structural tren d definitions referred to as "\;coordinated"\; and "\;uncoordi nated"\; trends that use friendship information to identify topics tha t are discussed among clustered and unconnected users respectively. Our an alyses and experiments show that structural trends are significantly diffe rent from traditional trends and provide new insights into the way people share information online. 

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This work was done jointly with Divyakant Agrawal and Ceren Budak.

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SPEAKER ’S BIOGRAPHY< /SPAN>

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Amr El Abbadi is a Professor in the Computer Sci ence Department at the University of California\, Santa Barbara where he a lso served as Department Chair from 2007 to 2011. He has been Program Chai r for multiple database and distributed systems conferences\, most recentl y SIGSPATIAL GIS 2010 and ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC) 2011\, a nd is also currently a journal editor \; for The VLDB Journal. He has also served as a board member of the VLDB Endowment from 2002-2008. In 200 7\, Prof. El Abbadi received the UCSB Senate Outstanding Mentorship Award for his excellence in mentoring graduate students. Prof. El Abbadi is an A CM Fellow.

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< /P>\n\n

LOCATION DETAILS:
\nThe School of Information Technologies is located in the new School of IT Building ( J12)\, 1 Cleveland Street at the eastern end of the Darlington campus of t he University of Sydney.
\nMaps are available here (see coordinates L25 /L26):
\n        http://db.auth.usyd.edu.au/direc tories/map/largemap00a.html

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