Events - Colloquia & Seminars

CCIS Colloquium Spring 2007

Structure and Evolution of Online Social Networks

Speaker: Ravi Kumar

Affiliation: Yahoo! Research

Date: Monday, April 2, 2007

Talk: 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m., 366 WVH

Abstract

Online social networks have become major and driving phenomena on the web.

In this talk we focus on the properties of two large online social networks, namely, the LiveJournal network of friends and the Flickr network of contacts. In the context of LiveJournal, we formulate a simple and general model of social networks that can explain the success of Milgram's famous experiment that gave rise to 'six-degrees of separation'. In the context of Flickr, we focus on the temporal evolution of social networks from a graph-structure point of view.

Brief Biography

Ravi Kumar joined Yahoo! Research in July 2005. Prior to this, he was a research staff member at the IBM Almaden Research Center in the Computer Science Principles and Methodologies group. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University in December 1997.

His primary interests are web algorithms, algorithms for large data sets, and theory of computation.