School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering
Network Science Seminar Series featuring David Kempe, professor, University of Southern California
Learning about social similarity from social network structure
What can a social network tell us about the underlying latent “social structure,” the way in which individuals are similar or dissimilar? Much of social network analysis is, implicitly or explicitly, predicated on the assumption that individuals tend to be more similar to their friends than to strangers. Having explict access to similarity information instead of merely the noisy signal provided by the presence or absence of edges could improve analysis significantly. We study the following natural question: give a social network–reflecting the underlying social distances between its nodes–how accurately can we reconstruct the social structure?
Friday, Oct. 19
1:30-2:30 p.m.
Brickyard Artisan Court 110
Biosketch
David Kempe is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. His primary research interests are in computer science theory and the design and analysis of algorithms, with a particular emphasis on social networks, algorithms for feature selection, and game-theoretic and pricing questions. Kempe holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University.
