[Nets-seminars] Talk on Friday 31st, GS/302 4pm

[Richard G. Clegg]

The next speaker in our seminar series is Jon Crowcroft from Cambridge.
[The full seminar list for this term is here 
http://wwws.ee.ucl.ac.uk/research/comminfosys/nsrg/talks]

Title:-
Online Social Networks in Real Life
Speaker:-
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jac22/cv.txt
Abstract:-
Social networks are all the rage. Of course, people were in social
networks before the advent of MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Orkut etc.
Real life social networks have been the object of many studies by
social scientists, looking at anything from school ties and retirement, to
judo clubs and wealth creation. Social science traditionally invovles
"heavy lifting" in terms of gathering empirical data through
observation, questionannaire and so forth. In recent work, we (and
other researchers) have measured human mobility and co-location more
directly. We realise that mining this data, alongside online-social
networks where people "self-declare" their relationships and
interests, and combining this with analysis of communication patterns,
can yield rich results that
1. give us deeper understanding of human society
2. allow us to build better infrastructures for communication
3. may better match technology for online versus real social life.

This talk is about some of our work in this space.


-- 
Richard G. Clegg,
Dept of Elec. Eng.,
University College London
http://www.richardclegg.org/