Overlapping Community Detection in Social Networks

Social networking sites are important to connect with the world virtually. As the number of users accessing these sites increase, the data and information keeps on increasing. There are communities and groups which are formed virtually based on different factors. We can visualize these communities as networks of users or nodes and the relationships or connections between them as edges. This helps in evaluating and analyzing different factors that influence community formation in such a dense network. Community detection helps in revealing certain characteristics which makes these groups in the network unique and different from one another. We can use such information to find trends in the network which might help in understanding complex systems. In this project, we will study the problem of detecting local overlapping commu- nities in a stream graph, by proposing a new metric that of common communities of the endpoints of a new edge. Moreover, we discover good seed nodes by finding an offline non overlapping community structure of a small sub graph as a preprocess- ing step. Additionally, we also evaluate these methods with different and extensive datasets. We experiment with a new web graph dataset along with some other more commonly used datasets. F1 score is used for datasets that have the ground truth. The proposed algorithm outperforms the traditional methods by 17%. For the new web graph dataset we use the overlapping modularity metric to evaluate our approach. This approach yields accurate modularity scores up to 0.71 for the web graph dataset increasing the accuracy by 10%. In the end, we discuss the approaches used and their results along with scope to improve for the future

Coaching Students For More Than A Career: Preparing Students For Life Beyond College Via Scholarly Personal Narrative Writing

What child does not want to do everything possible to please his or her parents? Many times children, regardless of age, find themselves struggling to decide what is right for them and what their parents feel is right for them. Parents are not always to blame for a child\u27s unsatisfied feeling. Children often have a hard time articulating what they are feeling on the inside. I now find myself in the same conundrum with college students who have difficulty articulating what they want in life. With writing as my medium, this thesis will use the power of both Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) and Epistolary Scholarly Personal Narrative (eSPN) to explore my personal battle with articulating what I want for myself and the world around me. With creation of a personal definition of success as my end goal, I will explore and exemplify how SPN and eSPN writing can be used in one\u27s life to reflect upon and articulate internal desires for how we want to live our lives. With my background in engineering and mathematics, I have found writing to be a release from the straightforward answers that I have been trained to search for. All types of people, engineers or not, can use the power of SPN and eSPN to dig deeper and find what exactly they want to do with their time. Finally, using narrative writing to help others write their stories will give both the reader and their respective audiences a medium through which to connect, i.e. SPN and/or eSPN writing