Keynote lectures
Alain Barrat, Director of Research at the CNRS and Centre de Physique Théorique (France), and Cecilia Mascolo, Reader in Mobile Systems at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge (UK), will be delivering keynote lectures at SIMPLEX 2012.
Alain Barrat
Dynamical Networks: from Measurements to Models
Abstract: In the last decade, a significant research activity has
developed in
the context of complex networks, largely motivated by the fact that
many systems can be represented by networks, that is to say a set of
sites or vertices connected by ties. More recently, the issue of
dynamic complex networks has emerged.
In this talk, I will discuss several examples of dynamic networks, in
order to highlight the importance of taking into account their
temporal dimension. I will first discuss examples of infrastructure
networks, and then focus on human interaction networks. In this
context, I will present the
SocioPatterns collaboration, in which we have developed an
infrastructure capable of measuring social interactions in real-time
in a limited space, such as conferences, offices, hospitals... and in
which we study the corresponding dynamical social networks. I will
present some results obtained by the deployment of this
infrastructure, which reveal unexpected regularities in social
interactions. I will also present a model of social dynamics that
reproduces a number of empirical facts, and describe some studies of
dynamical processes occurring on dynamical networks. I will conclude
with prospects offered by the area of dynamic networks.
Short biography
Dr. Alain Barrat obtained his PhD in theoretical physics at the University
of Paris VI (France) in 1996, under the supervision of M. Mézard.
The subject of the thesis was the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of spin
glasses. He then spent 2 years at the Abdus Salam ICTP in Trieste,
Italy, as a post-doctoral fellow. In 1998, he entered the National
Council for Scientific Research (CNRS) of France with a permanent
position as junior researcher. He spent 10 years at the Laboratoire de
Physique Théorique at the University of Paris-Sud. He is currently
CNRS senior researcher at the Centre de Physique Théorique in
Marseille. He is also research scientist at the Complex Networks and
Systems Group at the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Turin,
Italy.
Cecilia Mascolo
Space, Time and Social Ties: How Geographic Distance Shapes Online Social Networks
Abstract: While in the last years massive online social networks have
become
extremely popular, gathering and engaging millions of users, only
recently these social services are becoming location-aware. This
provides broad and fine grained data to investigate how spatial and
social structure blend together, opening exciting research directions
with promising scientific and practical applications. For instance, an
open question about human social behavior is to understand whether,
and how, spatial distance between two individuals affects their social
interaction. In this talk we will present how the socio-spatial
properties of online social networks can be studied and how social and
spatial properties can be jointly exploited to build new systems and
applications.
We discuss a comprehensive analysis of the spatial properties of the
social networks arising among users of three main popular online
location-based services. We observe robust universal features across
them: there is strong heterogeneity across users, with different
characteristic spatial lengths of interaction across both their social
ties and social triads. We extend these results with a detailed study
of the temporal evolution of a social network with spatial
information: since node degree and spatial distance simultaneously shape
user connections, we describe and evaluate a gravitational model of
network growth which is able to capture the social and spatial
properties observed in real networks, confirming our findings.
There a number of possible application of geo-social models for social
networks and we illustrate
the exploitation of our research in the design of a link prediction system
for online social networks based on the places that users visit as well as
a content cascade geographical spread prediction model which improves
content caching on content delivery networks.
Short biography
Dr. Cecilia Mascolo is a Reader in Mobile Systems in the Computer
Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK. Prior to this, she was with the
Department of Computer Science of University College London, UK. She holds
an MSc and PhD in Computer Science from University of Bologna (Italy).
Cecilia's research concentrates on mobility and social data gathering,
analysis, modeling and exploitation through research council and industry
funded projects. Most of the projects are multi-disciplinary. Her research
strategy is heavily experimental and deployment oriented. She has
published extensively in the areas of mobile sensor networks, mobile
network routing, realistic mobility models and social network analysis.
Cecilia has served as in the Organization Committees of many mobile and
sensor systems, social network, middleware, software engineering and data
mining conferences and workshops. She is on the editorial board of IEEE
Internet Computing and IEEE Pervasive Computing.
Proceedings
The proceedings can be found here.
Technical program
Morning Sessions Chair: Raul Mondragon
|
9:00 - 9:30
|
Welcome to the Workshop
|
Session: Complex Network Analysis
|
9:30 - 09:50
|
Social Media - Are They Underpinned by Social or Interest-based Interactions
Katarzyna Musial and Nishanth Sastry
|
|
9:50 - 10:10
|
Publish-Subscribe Systems via Gossip: a Study Based on Complex Networks
Stefano Ferretti
|
|
10:10 - 10:30
|
Topological Trends of Internet Content Providers
Yuval Shavitt and Udi Weinsberg
|
|
10:30 - 11:00
|
Coffee Break
|
|
11:00 - 12:00
|
Keynote by Cecilia Mascolo: "Space, Time and Social Ties: How Geographic Distance Shapes Online Social Networks"
|
Session: Auction Design and Systems Dynamics
|
12:00 - 12:20 |
On Social Community Networks: The Problem of Cost Sharing
Ranjan Pal, Pan Hui and Aravind Kailas |
|
12:20 - 12:40
|
The Dynamic Network Notation: Harnessing Network Effects in PaaS-Ecosystems
Ulrich Scholten, Robin Fischer and Christian Zirpins
|
Afternoon Sessions Chair: Nishanth Sastry
Session: Human Contacts
|
13:50 - 14:10
|
Quality Distributed Community Formation for Data Delivery in Pocket Switched
Networks
Matthew Orlinski and Nick Filer
|
|
14:10 - 14:30
|
Predicting Human Contacts in Mobile Social Networks Using Supervised Learning
Kazem Jahanbakhsh, Valerie King and Gholamali C. Shoja
|
|
14:30 - 15:30
|
Keynote by Alain Barrat: "Dynamical Networks: from Measurements to Models"
|
|
15:30 - 16:00
|
Coffee Break
|
Session: Centrality
|
16:00 - 16:20
|
Distributed Assessment of the Closeness Centrality Ranking in Complex Networks
Klaus Wehmuth and Artur Ziviani
|
|
16:20 - 16:40
|
Robustness of Centrality Measures against Link Weight Quantization in Social Network Analysis
Yukihiro Matsumoto, Sho Tsugawa, Hiroyuki Ohsaki and Makoto Imase
|
|
16:40 - 17:00
|
Wrapping up
|
