Francesco Bonchi (ISI foundation)
 
Sala riunioni, first floor, Dipartimento di Ingegneria, Via della Vasca Navale 79, 00149 Roma, Italy
On Wednesday, April 27, 2016
From 12 noon to 1pm
 
"On information propagation, social influence, and communities"
 
Abstract: With the success of online social networks and microblogging platforms such as Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, the phenomenon of influence-driven propagations, has recently attracted the interest of computer scientists, sociologists, information technologists, and marketing specialists. In this talk we will take a data mining perspective, discussing what (and how) can be learned from a social network and a database of traces of past propagations over the social network. Starting from one of the key problems in this area, i.e. the identification of influential users, we will provide a brief overview of our recent contributions in this area. We will expose the connection between the phenomenon of information propagation and the existence of communities in social network, and we will go deeper in this new research topic arising at the overlap of information propagation analysis and community detection.

Bio: Francesco Bonchi is Research Leader at the ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy, where he leades the "Algorithmic Data Analytics" group. He is also Scientific Director for Data Mining at Eurecat (Technological Center of Catalunya), Barcelona. Before he was Director of Research at Yahoo Labs in Barcelona, Spain, where he was leading the Web Mining Research group. His recent research interests include mining query-logs, social networks, and social media, as well as the privacy issues related to mining these kinds of sensible data. In the past he has been interested in data mining query languages, constrained pattern mining, mining spatiotemporal and mobility data, and privacy preserving data mining.