Keynote: Jon Kleinberg, Cornell University
The Flow of On-Line Information in Global Networks
Abstract
Increasingly, the information we experience on-line comes to us continuously over time, assembled from many small pieces, and conveyed through our social networks. This merging of information, network structure, and flow over time requires new ways of reasoning about the large-scale behavior of global networks, drawing on analogies to notions including contagion and mutation.
We discuss a set of approaches for tracking information as it travels and mutates in on-line networks, applying these ideas to a set of related problems. First, we show how this type of analysis can capture temporal patterns in the news over a daily time-scale --- in particular, the succession of story lines that evolve, compete for attention, and collectively produce an effect that commentators refer to as the `news cycle.' Second, we show how this approach can be combined with an analysis of network structure to trace the diffusion of specific pieces of information as they spread between people at a global scale.
This talk includes joint work with Lars Backstrom, Jure Leskovec, and David Liben-Nowell.
Bio:
Jon Kleinberg is on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Cornell University, where he holds the position of Tisch University Professor. His research focuses on issues at the interface of networks and information, with an emphasis on the social and information networks that underpin the Web and other on-line media. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of MacArthur, Packard, and Sloan Foundation Fellowships, the Nevanlinna Prize, Katayanagi Prize, ACM-Infosys Foundation Award, and National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiatives in Research.
