Social Networks

Papers examining social networks and their characteristics.

Algorithmic glass ceiling in social networks: the effects of social recommendations on network diversity

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 16 Comments
Algorithmic glass ceiling in social networks: the effects of social recommendations on network diversity Stoica et al., WWW'18 (If you don’t have ACM Digital Library access, the paper can be accessed either by following the link above directly from The Morning Paper blog site, or from the WWW 2018 proceedings page). Social networks were meant ... Continue Reading

Online actions with offline impact: how online social networks influence online and offline social behavior

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments
Online actions with offline impact: how online social networks influence online and offline user behavior Althoff et al., WSDM 2017 You can go to a lot of effort to build social networking features or support into your app or website. If the goal is engagement directly within the app then at least you have something ... Continue Reading

Beyond the words: predicting user personality from heterogeneous information

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments
Beyond the words: predicting user personality from heterogeneous information Wei et al., WSDM 2017 Here's a very topical paper! You may have seen the recent Motherboard piece, "The data that turned the world upside down," describing how personality profiling was used to provide tailored messages to voters in the recent American elections. In the interest ... Continue Reading

Reducing controversy by connecting opposing views

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments
Reducing controversy by connecting opposing views Garimella et al., WSDM 2017 Society is often polarized by controversial issues that split the population into groups with opposing views. When such issues emerge on social media, we often observe the creation of ‘echo chambers’, i.e., situations where like-minded people reinforce each other’s opinion, but do not get ... Continue Reading

SocialHash: An assignment framework for optimizing distributed systems operations on social networks

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment
SocialHash: An assignment framework for optimizing distributed systems operations on social networks - Shalita et al., NSDI '16 Large scale systems frequently need to partition resources or load across multiple nodes. How you do that can make a big difference. A common approach is to use a random distribution (e.g. via consistent hashing), which usually ... Continue Reading