Science and Industry

As discussed previously, Juuso Karikoski and I made a tiny study of multiple social networks. And we got trough the peer-review, and thus headed to IEEE Social Computing 2010.

In this post¹, I focus in the two interesting keynotes, first by Dr. Nashir Contractor and the second one by the famous Dr. Alex Sandy Pentland.

World of Warcraft, Katrina and multilevel networks

Nashir Contractor spoke how networks could be seen as multilevel — instead of just people (or objects) networking and generic links, there could be social objects and people mashed together with meaningful links: I could be the author of this blog text.

Nashir also spoke about computational social science² — a field where both computer sciences scholars and social sciences scholars need to collaborate.

However, he had some more actual content too. They’ve isolated eight different kind of reasons why we network:

• self-interest
• social and resource exchange
• collective action
• social status
• balance
• homophily
• proximity
• co-evolution

And guess what. Based on their research we can distinct these patterns based on structural behavior. They’ve actually used this method in Science of Networks in Communities-research group to detect gold farmers in EverQuest 2.  They’ve also examined the hurricane Katrina and pinpointed the time when FEMA’s role in relief efforts failed. Thus, the question rise: what if we had this kind of tools every day to help us make better decisions.

How social networks make us smart?

The topic of making these part of our every day toolset was continued by Sandy. His approach was a bit more technical: putting sensors every where. And what can we get out of that?

The first examples came from organization studies: the project where one team was only contacted via email and others regularly meet face to face failed nicely. And, these kind of tools allowed visualization of the information flow inside the company. These technologies are now tested also in the Army to make their work more efficient.

However, from that we moved to more urban sensing, maybe something I would call city movements. With this amount of technology we can pinpoint where you live and move. First nice result from that is smart traffic applications, busses and taxis being in right locations. However this gets more deeper, as Sandy explained.

Based on where you live and move, they actually could estimate weather you had an iPhone or an Android, and all sorts of strange data. We went trough bunch of colorful maps and it almost got a bit scary. And, as said: this data is already now easy to collect.

But as said, this was scary, and privacy issues were discussed. Let’s see what actually happens in data ownership in few years…

1. and some comments on papers will follow later… [↩]
2. This is defined Science-magazine and seems to be big thing in the States, severals degree programs in this area… Some of them actually sound interesting. [↩]

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.