Harvard Business Review
Smarter social networking tips from two doyens of the Digerati: John Hagel III and John Seely Brown
ICWSM Presentation
Brian Keegan presented on behalf of the Virtual World Observatory’s gold farming team at the 2011 AAAI International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). A copy of the paper titled “Trust Amongst Rogues? A Hypergraph Approach for Comparing Clandestine Trust Networks in MMOGs” can be found here and the accompanying slides can be found here. The abstract:
Gold farming and real money trade refer to a set of illicit practices in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) whereby players accumulate virtual resources to sell for ―real world‖ money. Prior work has examined trade relationships formed by gold farmers but not the trust relationships which exist between members of these organizations. We adopt a hypergraph approach to model the multi-modal relationships of gold farmers granting other players permission to use and modify objects they own. We argue these permissions reflect underlying trust relationships which can be analyzed using network analysis methods. We compare farmers’ trust networks to the trust networks of both unidentified farmers and typical players. Our results demonstrate that gold farmers’ networks are different from trust networks of normal players whereby farmers trust highly-central non-farmer players but not each other. These findings have implications for augmenting detection methods and re-evaluating theories of clandestine behavior.
Contractor Presents in three Panels at INGroup
SONIC Lab director Noshir Contractor presents in three panels at the 6th Annual INGroup Conference. Topics discussed include team research and team science, challenges in studying groups, and teamwork on virtual organizations. Visit the INGroup website for more details.
Start-Up Handles Social Media Background Checks – NYTimes.com
Video Presentation from WebSci11
A video of Brian Keegan’s presentation of the “Computational Social Science of Clandestine Organizations” at the Web Science 2011 conference is available online: http://videolectures.net/acmwebsci2011_keegan_intersection/
Contractor to teach Workshop in Trento, Italy
Director of SONIC Lab, Noshir Contractor, will be teaching a workshop on Social Networks concepts and analysis techniques in Trento Italy next week. The course will introduce and illustrate social networks as a suitable conceptual tool to depict and empirically analyze complex datasets characterizing the cloud-computing era. More information can be found at the University of Trento’s website.
Google Wants You to Solve Problems For Money
Six Questions Board Members Should Ask About Social Media Usage – Boardmember.com
Teaming up with genomics to solve outbreaks
Jennifer Gardy of the British Columbia Center for Disease Control, presented a case study where she and her colleagues used a technique combining genome sequencing and social network analysis to contain a tuberculosis outbreak. Taking place in a medium-sized community in British Columbia, the researchers turned to the technique after finding traditional epidemiological methods rather ineffective. Combining social network analysis with genome sequencing allowed the researchers to paint a more detailed picture of the epidemic’s underlying structure.
The researchers eventually determined that the outbreak was likely not instigated by genetic changes to the pathogen, but instead likely due to tendencies in the community interaction. Additionally they were able to determine that a few key individuals acted as superspreaders, and these people were socially well connected and sympotmatic for long periods of time. This information is being used in a current outbreak investigation where public health officials are trying to target socially popular people for screening as a priority.