30,962 research outputs found
Determination of Friendship Intensity between Online Social Network Users Based on Their Interaction
Online social networks (OSN) are one of the most popular forms of modern
communication and among the best known is Facebook. Information about the
connection between users on the OSN is often very scarce. It's only known if
users are connected, while the intensity of the connection is unknown. The aim
of the research described was to determine and quantify friendship intensity
between OSN users based on analysis of their interaction. We built a
mathematical model, which uses: supervised machine learning algorithm Random
Forest, experimentally determined importance of communication parameters and
coefficients for every interaction parameter based on answers of research
conducted through a survey. Taking user opinion into consideration while
designing a model for calculation of friendship intensity is a novel approach
in opposition to previous researches from literature. Accuracy of the proposed
model was verified on the example of determining a better friend in the offered
pair
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AGENT: Alumni growth and engagement across new technologies
The AGENT project aims to use social networking technologies (LinkedIn and Facebook) to support the development of undergraduatesâ employability and career development. The focus of the project is on e-mentoring by alumni to provide a âbridgeâ between individuals whose social ties and connections are weakened by time and distance, whilst at the same time capitalising on the learning opportunities afforded by the widening of social networks. Social networking sites (SNSs) have been shown to provide students with the tools to make connections, build relationships and support personal development. From a social capital perspective, SNSs can support âweak tiesâ by allowing students to grow a social network from which to draw resources in the form of information, knowledge, advice and expertise that an institutionâs alumni can provide. Alumni are a key resource for building professional networking communities that can provide offline as well as online support to students. We report on an on-going JISC project âAGENT (Alumni Growth and Engagement across New Technologies) that explores how Web 2.0 technologies engage alumni, create the sense of belonging, develop more effective and mutually-beneficial alumni-student connections and associated positive social capital outcomes.Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) 2011-201
Animating and sustaining niche social networks
Within the communicative space online Social Network Sites (SNS) afford, Niche Social Networks Sites (NSNS) have emerged around particular geographic, demographic or topic-based communities to provide what broader SNS do not: specified and targeted content for an engaged and interested community. Drawing on a research project developed at the Queensland University of Technology in conjunction with the Australian Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre that produced an NSNS based around Adventure Travel, this paper outlines the main drivers for community creation and sustainability within NSNS. The paper asks what factors motivate users to join and stay with these sites and what, if any, common patterns can be noted in their formation. It also outlines the main barriers to online participation and content creation in NSNS, and the similarities and differences in SNS and NSNS business models. Having built a community of 100 registered members, the staywild.com.au project was a living laboratory, enabling us to document the steps taken in producing a NSNS and cultivating and retaining active contributors. The paper incorporates observational analysis of user-generated content (UGC) and user profile submissions, statistical analysis of site usage, and findings from a survey of our membership pool in noting areas of success and of failure. In drawing on our project in this way we provide a template for future iterations of NSNS initiation and development across various other social settings: not only niche communities, but also the media and advertising with which they engage and interact. Positioned within the context of online user participation and UGC research, our paper concludes with a discussion of the ways in which the tools afforded by NSNS extend earlier understandings of online âcommunities of interestâ. It also outlines the relevance of our research to larger questions about the diversity of the social media ecology
An Email Attachment is Worth a Thousand Words, or Is It?
There is an extensive body of research on Social Network Analysis (SNA) based
on the email archive. The network used in the analysis is generally extracted
either by capturing the email communication in From, To, Cc and Bcc email
header fields or by the entities contained in the email message. In the latter
case, the entities could be, for instance, the bag of words, url's, names,
phones, etc. It could also include the textual content of attachments, for
instance Microsoft Word documents, excel spreadsheets, or Adobe pdfs. The nodes
in this network represent users and entities. The edges represent communication
between users and relations to the entities. We suggest taking a different
approach to the network extraction and use attachments shared between users as
the edges. The motivation for this is two-fold. First, attachments represent
the "intimacy" manifestation of the relation's strength. Second, the
statistical analysis of private email archives that we collected and Enron
email corpus shows that the attachments contribute in average around 80-90% to
the archive's disk-space usage, which means that most of the data is presently
ignored in the SNA of email archives. Consequently, we hypothesize that this
approach might provide more insight into the social structure of the email
archive. We extract the communication and shared attachments networks from
Enron email corpus. We further analyze degree, betweenness, closeness, and
eigenvector centrality measures in both networks and review the differences and
what can be learned from them. We use nearest neighbor algorithm to generate
similarity groups for five Enron employees. The groups are consistent with
Enron's organizational chart, which validates our approach.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, 7 tables, IML'17, Liverpool, U
Detecting Strong Ties Using Network Motifs
Detecting strong ties among users in social and information networks is a
fundamental operation that can improve performance on a multitude of
personalization and ranking tasks. Strong-tie edges are often readily obtained
from the social network as users often participate in multiple overlapping
networks via features such as following and messaging. These networks may vary
greatly in size, density and the information they carry. This setting leads to
a natural strong tie detection task: given a small set of labeled strong tie
edges, how well can one detect unlabeled strong ties in the remainder of the
network?
This task becomes particularly daunting for the Twitter network due to scant
availability of pairwise relationship attribute data, and sparsity of strong
tie networks such as phone contacts. Given these challenges, a natural approach
is to instead use structural network features for the task, produced by {\em
combining} the strong and "weak" edges. In this work, we demonstrate via
experiments on Twitter data that using only such structural network features is
sufficient for detecting strong ties with high precision. These structural
network features are obtained from the presence and frequency of small network
motifs on combined strong and weak ties. We observe that using motifs larger
than triads alleviate sparsity problems that arise for smaller motifs, both due
to increased combinatorial possibilities as well as benefiting strongly from
searching beyond the ego network. Empirically, we observe that not all motifs
are equally useful, and need to be carefully constructed from the combined
edges in order to be effective for strong tie detection. Finally, we reinforce
our experimental findings with providing theoretical justification that
suggests why incorporating these larger sized motifs as features could lead to
increased performance in planted graph models.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of WWW 2017 (Web-science track
Using Text Similarity to Detect Social Interactions not Captured by Formal Reply Mechanisms
In modeling social interaction online, it is important to understand when
people are reacting to each other. Many systems have explicit indicators of
replies, such as threading in discussion forums or replies and retweets in
Twitter. However, it is likely these explicit indicators capture only part of
people's reactions to each other, thus, computational social science approaches
that use them to infer relationships or influence are likely to miss the mark.
This paper explores the problem of detecting non-explicit responses, presenting
a new approach that uses tf-idf similarity between a user's own tweets and
recent tweets by people they follow. Based on a month's worth of posting data
from 449 ego networks in Twitter, this method demonstrates that it is likely
that at least 11% of reactions are not captured by the explicit reply and
retweet mechanisms. Further, these uncaptured reactions are not evenly
distributed between users: some users, who create replies and retweets without
using the official interface mechanisms, are much more responsive to followees
than they appear. This suggests that detecting non-explicit responses is an
important consideration in mitigating biases and building more accurate models
when using these markers to study social interaction and information diffusion.Comment: A final version of this work was published in the 2015 IEEE 11th
International Conference on e-Science (e-Science
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