8,083 research outputs found
Validating Network Value of Influencers by means of Explanations
Recently, there has been significant interest in social influence analysis.
One of the central problems in this area is the problem of identifying
influencers, such that by convincing these users to perform a certain action
(like buying a new product), a large number of other users get influenced to
follow the action. The client of such an application is a marketer who would
target these influencers for marketing a given new product, say by providing
free samples or discounts. It is natural that before committing resources for
targeting an influencer the marketer would be interested in validating the
influence (or network value) of influencers returned. This requires digging
deeper into such analytical questions as: who are their followers, on what
actions (or products) they are influential, etc. However, the current
approaches to identifying influencers largely work as a black box in this
respect. The goal of this paper is to open up the black box, address these
questions and provide informative and crisp explanations for validating the
network value of influencers.
We formulate the problem of providing explanations (called PROXI) as a
discrete optimization problem of feature selection. We show that PROXI is not
only NP-hard to solve exactly, it is NP-hard to approximate within any
reasonable factor. Nevertheless, we show interesting properties of the
objective function and develop an intuitive greedy heuristic. We perform
detailed experimental analysis on two real world datasets - Twitter and
Flixster, and show that our approach is useful in generating concise and
insightful explanations of the influence distribution of users and that our
greedy algorithm is effective and efficient with respect to several baselines
'Better Together' : Establishing an effective and sustainable (relational) peer coaching process for staff in the Higher Education Sector: an exploratory project
Project funded by the Leadership Foundation for Higher EducationThis report presents the findings from a small, qualitative project which aimed to explore strategies for establishing an effective and sustainable (relational) peer coaching process for staff working across the Higher Education Sector. The original aim was to explore the feasibility of establishing a sustainable peer coaching model in a HEI, and beyond that, an inter-institutional peer coaching network.Final Published versio
MANCaLog: A Logic for Multi-Attribute Network Cascades (Technical Report)
The modeling of cascade processes in multi-agent systems in the form of
complex networks has in recent years become an important topic of study due to
its many applications: the adoption of commercial products, spread of disease,
the diffusion of an idea, etc. In this paper, we begin by identifying a
desiderata of seven properties that a framework for modeling such processes
should satisfy: the ability to represent attributes of both nodes and edges, an
explicit representation of time, the ability to represent non-Markovian
temporal relationships, representation of uncertain information, the ability to
represent competing cascades, allowance of non-monotonic diffusion, and
computational tractability. We then present the MANCaLog language, a formalism
based on logic programming that satisfies all these desiderata, and focus on
algorithms for finding minimal models (from which the outcome of cascades can
be obtained) as well as how this formalism can be applied in real world
scenarios. We are not aware of any other formalism in the literature that meets
all of the above requirements
FINDING HER MASTER’S VOICE: THE POWER OF COLLECTIVE ACTION AMONG FEMALE MUSLIM BLOGGERS
Emerging cyber-collective movements have frequently made headlines in the news. Despite the exponential growth of bloggers in Muslim countries, there is a lack of empirical study of cyber-collective actions in these countries. We analyzed the female Muslim blogosphere because very little research attempts to understand socio-political roles of female bloggers in the system where women are frequently denied freedom of expression. We collected 150 blogs from 17 countries ranging between April 2003 and July 2010 with a special focus on Al-Huwaider’s campaigns for our analysis. Bearing the analysis upon three central tenets of individual, community, and transnational perspectives, we develop novel algorithms modeling cyber-collective movements by utilizing existing social theories on collective action and computational social network analysis. This paper contributes a methodology to study the diffusion of issues in social networks and examines roles of influential community members. We also observe the transcending nature of cyber-collective movements with future possibilities for modeling transnational outreach. Using the global female Muslim blogosphere, we provide understanding of the complexity and dynamics of cyber-collective action. To the best of our knowledge, our research is the first to address the lacking fundamental research shedding light on re-framing collective action theory in online environments
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