Title: The cognitive landscape of social networks
Speaker: Dr. Eric Yu-En Lu, University of Cambridge
Time: 2:20pm, Nov 13 (Fri), 2009
Place: Room 102, CSIE building

Abstract:

Social networks have been shown to exert profound influence over or to correlate strongly with complex social and biological phenomena. The classical results in this area span well over 40 years and have emerged out of a wide variety of studies such as knowledge diffusion of antibiotics \cite{66.SocialMed}, human mutations \cite{09.SNPSocialNet}, and obesity \cite{07.ObesitySocialNet}, to name a few. These results exemplify how understanding the underlying social process can lead to explanations in the wide phenomenon.

In the past decade, the proliferation of information systems and web services have enabled human data collection in an unprecedented scale, e.g., \cite{08.FacebookData}, \cite{07.StructureTieStrength}, \cite{08.MessengerNET}. Recent advances in online social networks such as twitter, Google maps, and flickr photo streams already give sharp gauges to the underlying human perception and activity.

In this talk, I will go through results from phone, online social networks, and the primate dataset to discuss recent trends in social network formation and some ideas we are exploring.

Short Biography:

Dr. Eric Yu-En Lu is a research associate in Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge and a junior research fellow in Wolfson College, the most cosmopolitan college in Cambridge. His primary research interest is in complex systems including topics like high-dimensional data analysis and mining, stochastic modelling, and very large stream databases. With collaborators, he has worked in high throughput proteomics, structural biology, and quantum physics. Prior to his PhD in Cambridge, he obtained his BA and Masters from National Taiwan University. In his spare time, Eric enjoys hiking, theatre, travel, and reading the Economist.