Social Network Analytics: Beyond the Obvious

Abstract

Over the last decade and a half, there has been an explosion of interest in the analysis and mining of very large networks, including those arising in social and information networks, biological networks such as protein-protein interaction networks, web graph, collaboration networks, customer-product interaction networks, and road networks, to name a few. The interest has been fueled by driving applications as well as by the unprecedented availability of real network data. Of particular note among the driving applications are the study of spread of infections and innovations, word-of-mouth marketing or the so-called viral marketing, and tracking of events and stories in social media. In this talk, I will use viral marketing and event and story evolution tracking as concrete settings with which to describe some exciting research that has been done over the past several years. In the process, I will briefly discuss some less obvious applications of mining large graphs.