Science and Industry

One thing I’ve been interested for a while are the social networks we develop and document in the modern communication era. Services like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are not just sharing content, it’s about the networks that are build in these services. Also, e-mails and phone calls would allow us to investigate human patterns in totally new way.

However, often the problem seems to be around getting this kind of data — and being allowed to share the results you make. Luckily, I go acceptance from Helsinki Insitute of Information Technology to develop and publish my, yet unfinished ideas in the project blog. The story there is in Finnish, but I’ll summarize the one main point below.

From the figure we note, that there are two distinct islands. What has caused this kind of behavior? Are there e.g. two different departments there, or some other reason. How to study this further? Luckily the OtaSizzle research project has also other details of users, such as sex, age, survey data, which can be overlaid to this data, and look what we get out. This is, what I (and others from HIIT) will be doing in 2010.

I worked during the summer with OtaSizzle, which has a main component (Aalto Social Interface) that allows everyone to build new services ontop of it. Even thought my work effort is not especially well visible, it feels goof — finally got something out in the wild.

Now the system is go in the sense that there has been a huge marketing push of the two lead services, Kassi and Ossi.¹ There are even actual users of in these services.

Well, this is a research thing after all. The guys in HIIT are intressed in the groups and related stuff. I might be doing some social network analysis based on that data… And let’s see what else we can pull out from this.

1. Kassi is a service that facilitates exchange of favors and items and Ossi is a mobile, context aware social service [↩]