91,368 research outputs found
Together we stand, Together we fall, Together we win: Dynamic Team Formation in Massive Open Online Courses
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer a new scalable paradigm for
e-learning by providing students with global exposure and opportunities for
connecting and interacting with millions of people all around the world. Very
often, students work as teams to effectively accomplish course related tasks.
However, due to lack of face to face interaction, it becomes difficult for MOOC
students to collaborate. Additionally, the instructor also faces challenges in
manually organizing students into teams because students flock to these MOOCs
in huge numbers. Thus, the proposed research is aimed at developing a robust
methodology for dynamic team formation in MOOCs, the theoretical framework for
which is grounded at the confluence of organizational team theory, social
network analysis and machine learning. A prerequisite for such an undertaking
is that we understand the fact that, each and every informal tie established
among students offers the opportunities to influence and be influenced.
Therefore, we aim to extract value from the inherent connectedness of students
in the MOOC. These connections carry with them radical implications for the way
students understand each other in the networked learning community. Our
approach will enable course instructors to automatically group students in
teams that have fairly balanced social connections with their peers, well
defined in terms of appropriately selected qualitative and quantitative network
metrics.Comment: In Proceedings of 5th IEEE International Conference on Application of
Digital Information & Web Technologies (ICADIWT), India, February 2014 (6
pages, 3 figures
Influence of augmented humans in online interactions during voting events
The advent of the digital era provided a fertile ground for the development
of virtual societies, complex systems influencing real-world dynamics.
Understanding online human behavior and its relevance beyond the digital
boundaries is still an open challenge. Here we show that online social
interactions during a massive voting event can be used to build an accurate map
of real-world political parties and electoral ranks. We provide evidence that
information flow and collective attention are often driven by a special class
of highly influential users, that we name "augmented humans", who exploit
thousands of automated agents, also known as bots, for enhancing their online
influence. We show that augmented humans generate deep information cascades, to
the same extent of news media and other broadcasters, while they uniformly
infiltrate across the full range of identified groups. Digital augmentation
represents the cyber-physical counterpart of the human desire to acquire power
within social systems.Comment: 11 page
Approximate Closest Community Search in Networks
Recently, there has been significant interest in the study of the community
search problem in social and information networks: given one or more query
nodes, find densely connected communities containing the query nodes. However,
most existing studies do not address the "free rider" issue, that is, nodes far
away from query nodes and irrelevant to them are included in the detected
community. Some state-of-the-art models have attempted to address this issue,
but not only are their formulated problems NP-hard, they do not admit any
approximations without restrictive assumptions, which may not always hold in
practice.
In this paper, given an undirected graph G and a set of query nodes Q, we
study community search using the k-truss based community model. We formulate
our problem of finding a closest truss community (CTC), as finding a connected
k-truss subgraph with the largest k that contains Q, and has the minimum
diameter among such subgraphs. We prove this problem is NP-hard. Furthermore,
it is NP-hard to approximate the problem within a factor , for
any . However, we develop a greedy algorithmic framework,
which first finds a CTC containing Q, and then iteratively removes the furthest
nodes from Q, from the graph. The method achieves 2-approximation to the
optimal solution. To further improve the efficiency, we make use of a compact
truss index and develop efficient algorithms for k-truss identification and
maintenance as nodes get eliminated. In addition, using bulk deletion
optimization and local exploration strategies, we propose two more efficient
algorithms. One of them trades some approximation quality for efficiency while
the other is a very efficient heuristic. Extensive experiments on 6 real-world
networks show the effectiveness and efficiency of our community model and
search algorithms
Dynamic communities in multichannel data: An application to the foreign exchange market during the 2007--2008 credit crisis
We study the cluster dynamics of multichannel (multivariate) time series by
representing their correlations as time-dependent networks and investigating
the evolution of network communities. We employ a node-centric approach that
allows us to track the effects of the community evolution on the functional
roles of individual nodes without having to track entire communities. As an
example, we consider a foreign exchange market network in which each node
represents an exchange rate and each edge represents a time-dependent
correlation between the rates. We study the period 2005-2008, which includes
the recent credit and liquidity crisis. Using dynamical community detection, we
find that exchange rates that are strongly attached to their community are
persistently grouped with the same set of rates, whereas exchange rates that
are important for the transfer of information tend to be positioned on the
edges of communities. Our analysis successfully uncovers major trading changes
that occurred in the market during the credit crisis.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Chao
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