W3233 -- Networks and Complexity in Social Systems (Collective Dynamics Group ISERP -- Columbia University) Course Syllabus

The Networks and Complexity in Social Systems course commences with an overview of the nascent field of complex networks, dividing it into three related but distinct strands: Statistical description of large scale networks, viewed as static objects; the dynamic evolution of networks, where now the structure of the network is understood in terms of a growth process; and dynamical processes that take place on fixed networks; that is, "networked dynamical systems". (A fourth area of potential research ties all the previous three strands together under the rubric of co-evolution of networks and dynamics, but very little research has been done in this vein and so it is omitted.) The remainder of the course treats each of the three strands in greater detail, introducing technical knowledge as required, summarizing the research papers that have introduced the principal ideas, and pointing out directions for future development. With regard to networked dynamical systems, the course treats in detail the more specific topic of information propagation in networks, in part because this topic is of great relevance to social science, and in part because it has received the most attention in the literature to date.

WAIS Seminar:Modelling the Web: Examples of modelling language, network evolution and physical-social systems

Speaker(s): Prof. Steffen Staab Organiser: Dr Tim Chown Time: 23/05/2014 10:30-11:30 Location: B53/4025 Abstract The Web is constructed based on our experiences in a multitude of modalities: text, networks, images, physical locations are some examples. Understanding the Web requires from us that we can model these modalities as they appear on the Web. In this talk I will show some examples of how we model text, hyperlink networks and physical-social systems in order to improve our understanding and our use of the Web.

Introduction to the Social Networking Systems Course

These are the Introduction slides for Comp6051 Social Networking Technologies. They outline the structure of the course, and give a (very brief) overview of the topics covered.

Scalable real-time crisis mapping and analytics of social media streams for disaster management and breaking news

Real-time geoparsing of social media streams (e.g. Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Flickr, FourSquare) is providing a new 'virtual sensor' capability to end users such as emergency response agencies (e.g. Tsunami early warning centres, Civil protection authorities) and news agencies (e.g. Deutsche Welle, BBC News). Challenges in this area include scaling up natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR) approaches to handle real-time traffic volumes, reducing false positives, creating real-time infographic displays useful for effective decision support and providing support for trust and credibility analysis using geosemantics. I will present in this seminar on-going work by the IT Innovation Centre over the last 4 years (TRIDEC and REVEAL FP7 projects) in building such systems, and highlights our research towards improving trustworthy and credible of crisis map displays and real-time analytics for trending topics and influential social networks during major news worthy events.

The Age of Social Machines

Many of the most successful and important systems that impact our lives combine humans, data, and algorithms at Web Scale. These social machines are amalgamations of human and machine intelligence. This seminar will provide an update on SOCIAM, a five year EPSRC Programme Grant that seeks to gain a better understanding of social machines; how they are observed and constituted, how they can be designed and their fate determined. We will review how social machines can be of value to society, organisations and individuals. We will consider the challenges they present to our various disciplines.

Bias in the Social Web

Abstract A frequent assumption in Social Media is that its open nature leads to a representative view of the world. In this talk we want to consider bias occurring in the Social Web. We will consider a case study of liquid feedback, a direct democracy platform of the German pirate party as well as models of (non-)discriminating systems. As a conclusion of this talk we stipulate the need of Social Media systems to bias their working according to social norms and to publish the bias they introduce. Speaker Biography: Prof Steffen Staab Steffen studied in Erlangen (Germany), Philadelphia (USA) and Freiburg (Germany) computer science and computational linguistics. Afterwards he worked as researcher at Uni. Stuttgart/Fraunhofer and Univ. Karlsruhe, before he became professor in Koblenz (Germany). Since March 2015 he also holds a chair for Web and Computer Science at Univ. of Southampton sharing his time between here and Koblenz. In his research career he has managed to avoid almost all good advice that he now gives to his team members. Such advise includes focusing on research (vs. company) or concentrating on only one or two research areas (vs. considering ontologies, semantic web, social web, data engineering, text mining, peer-to-peer, multimedia, HCI, services, software modelling and programming and some more). Though, actually, improving how we understand and use text and data is a good common denominator for a lot of Steffen's professional activities.