COS Independent Work Seminar

Analyzing relationship networks:
social networks and beyond

COS IW01
Fall 2015

General Information:

Instructor: Andrea LaPaugh,
Office hours Mondays 2:30-4:30 in CS304
Teaching Assistant: Mehmet Basbug,
Office hours Tuesdays between 1:30pm and 2:30pm in the common area next to CS244
Meeting time and place: Fridays 1:30-2:50PM, Room 301 Computer Science Building
Links: Description, Schedule, Resources, FAQ, Piazza

Description:

Information is not only found in objects such as HTML documents, databases or images, but in the relationships between objects. The person-to-person interactions captured by social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter are excellent examples of the rich source of information provided by relationships. However the class of relationships containing useful information is much broader than friends and followers. Some examples include the win-lose relationship between sports teams and the contact relationship of individuals with respect to the spread of disease. The tools of social network analysis can be applied broadly to discover useful information about relative strengths, pivotal roles, community structure, and other properties within a set of related objects. It can be combined with other data mining techniques for deeper analysis. This independent work seminar will support projects in social network analysis. The typical project will focus on a particular collection of data containing relationships (possibly compiled from multiple sources), formulate a set of question about the data, and apply social network analysis to answer the questions. Projects that develop new analysis techniques are also possible. The seminar will provide background in social network analysis, resource lists of tools and datasets, and, most importantly, the opportunity for students to discuss their work and problem solve together. Some projects from past years using social network analysis: ''Connecting Congress: An Analysis of Congress as a Social Network,'' ''An Analysis of Public Bicycle Sharing Programs''

Keywords: social network analysis, graph properties, data mining, metadata

Schedule (Updated):

Date	Topic	Notes
Sept 18	Information meeting for all IW students	NEW TIME! 12:30-1:30PM, CS 104 ( Large Aud.)
Sept 18	First seminar meeting: Introduction
Sept 25	Develop project plans
Oct 2	Develop project plans
Oct 6		Written proposals due
Oct 9	Proposal talks I	everyone hand in proposal talk slides
Oct 16	Proposal talks II
Oct 23	Proposal talks III and discussion
Oct 30	Discussion and feedback
Nov 6	Fall break
Tues Nov 10		Checkpoint form due
Nov 13	Discussion and feedback	Draft of bibliography due
Nov 20	Discussion and feedback	Draft of related work due
Nov 27	Thanksgiving break
Dec 4	Discussion and feedback	Draft of introduction due; draft of approach highly recommended
Dec 11	Report talks I	Report talk slides due
Tues Dec 15		Draft of approach due; submit as much of paper as can for feedback
Dec 18	Report talks II
Jan 5		Written final report due
Jan 11	Poster session for all IW students	Convocation Room (Friend Center), 10AM-1PM

Resources:

Independent work:
Data sets and Software: IW01 resource list
Readings of interest:

Long references: brows through these for an overview; read what looks interesting or useful to you. Note that the three authors of these references are a social scientist, a computer scientist, and a physicist, representing three of the major fields in which network analysis was developed.

Easley, David; Kleinberg, Jon. Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World, Cambridge University Press, July 19, 2010. You can download a pdf file (18.6 MB) of a draft version dated June 10, 2010. The book is available online through a Princeton University Library subscription to Safari books online here. You must access this from domain princeton.edu.

This book requires no technical background. It treats both the math/computer science perspective and the sociology perspective. Part I gives the basics for network analysis, but you may find other parts relevant as well.

Newman, M.E.J., "The Structure and Function of Complex Networks", SIAM Review, 45(2), 2003, pp167–256. PDF accessible from domain princeton.edu.

This is a highly cited, detailed technical review of network analysis.

Papers: Here are a couple of published papers that illustrate studies of social networks:

Planetary-scale views on a large instant-messaging network, Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz, Proc. Intern. Conf. on World Wide Web (WWW), ACM, 2008, pp, 915-924.
Romantic Partnerships and the Dispersion of Social Ties: A Network Analysis of Relationship Status on Facebook, Lars Backstrom and Jon Kleinberg, Proc. Conf. on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), ACM, 2014, pp. 831-841.

Conferences: These are some of the conferences that may contain papers on the topics of our seminar. Brows through them to see some of what is happening in current research.

Proceedings of the Intern. Conf. on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), ACM. Link is to most recent meeting, Feb 2015. Full text requires access from domain princeton.edu.
Proceedings of the Intern. World Wide Web Conference (WWW). Link is to most recent meeting, May 2015. Here is an alternate site that does not require access from domain princeton.edu.
Proceedings of the Workshop on Online Social Networks (WOSN), ACM SIGCOMM. Link is to most recent meeting, Aug. 2012. This workshop grew up to be:
Proceedings of the Conference on Online Social Networks (COSN), ACM. Link is to most recent meeting, Oct. 2014.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Can projects be done in groups?
Yes, 2 or 3 students can work on a group project. However, each student must have a well-defined part of the project that is not too narrow, and each student must write a self-contained paper.

check back for more

last revised Wed Oct 28 17:17:11 EDT 2015