Seminar of Computer Networks: Online Social Networks and Network
Economics
Academic Year 2009 / 2010
Online social networks have become a major driving phenomena on the web
since the Internet has expanded as to include users and their social
systems in its description and operation. Internet has developed from a
communication medium and information sharing devise into a platform
enabling a wide range of new social activities and applications. There
is a growing number of highly-popular user-centric applications in
Internet that rely on social networks for mining and filtering
information, for providing recommendations, tags, annotations, as well
as for ranking of documents and services. Successfully striking examples
are collaborative recommendation systems (e.g., Amazon for books and
Netflix for DVDs), folksonomies - systems of collaborative social
tagging - (e.g., Citeulike, Delicious, Flickr and Youtube), cooperative
systems for building repositories of information as Wikipedia, systems
of social networking (e.g., myspace, Facebook) and forum of discussion
and opinion formation (e.g., blogs and Web communities). In this course
we will present the design principles and the main structural
properties and theoretical models of on-line social networks, algorithms
for data mining in social networks, and some network economic issues.
Announcements
1/7/2010: The solutions for the second
homework are out.
20/6/2010: From 22/6 Aris will be out of Rome with limited access to
email. For questions mail to
Ilaria or to
Stefano Leonardi.
18/6/2010: There is a disagreement between the due date of homework 2
in the web page and in the homework. Thus, we move the due date to June
30. You can email the homework to Stefano Leonardi.
1/6/2010: The second homework is out, due
June 30. Same instructions as the first one.
6/5/2010: You can find the directions and some ideas about the
final projects here. In the final exam you
will have to present your final project and to talk about your mistakes
in the homeworks. For questions send an email to Aris or Ilaria.
6/5/2010: The solutions for the first
homework are out. You should study them for the final exam. If you have
any questions or if you find any mistakes please send an email to
Aris.
29/4/2010: If you're searching for a partner for the final project
send an email to Aris to try to
match you.
30/3/2010: The first homework is out, due April 28, before class. Read carefully the instructions.
Instructors
Prof. Stefano Lenardi,
Sapienza University of Rome
Dr. Aris Anagnostopoulos,
Sapienza University of Rome,
email: aris@cs.brown.edu
Ilaria Bordino, Sapienza University of Rome
When and Where
When: Wednesday 14.00-15.30 and 16.00-17.30
Where: Via Ariosto 25, Aula
Office Hours
Aris: Monday, 2pm-3pm, office B118. If you have classes at this time we can
arrange by email.
Book
There does not exist a book for the class material. We will post the slides
and maybe some notes for some of the lectures.
Syllabus
We will cover some of the following topics, and maybe a few more to be
decided:
- Structure of social networks
- Models for social networks
- Epidemics and influence processes
- Mining of social networks
- Detecting communities
- Web Mining
- Finding content in blogs
- Auction theory
- Computational advertising
Homeworks, Exams
We will have 2 homework sets and a final project.
Homework 1 (due April 28, before class)
Solutions for Homework 1.
Homework 2 (due June 30)
Solutions for Homework 2.
Instructions for the final project.
Handouts
Class notes (last updated 14/3/2010)
4/3/2010: Basic combinatorics
Basic matirial for counting permutations and combinations, binomial
coefficients, etc.
4/3/2010: Introduction to probability
Here you can find a brief introduction to probability. Make sure that
you understand all the material.
4/3/2010: Random variables
This describes random variable, expectation, variance, and other related
topics. We will work mostly with discrete random variables but you
should know the basics for the continuous ones.
4/3/2010: Main distribution functions
It describes the main types of distributions. Definitely understand
Section 5.1 and you can study the rest when we do them in the class
Slides
Make sure that you read also the lecture notes
for the material we covered and is not in the slides (networks models, etc.).
4/3/2010: Introduction, 3/3/2010: Introduction, structural
properties, Erdos-Renyi random-graph model
14/3/2010: Probability, 10/3/2010: Basic discrete probability, random variables, expectation
25/3/2010: Epidemics and Models for
Contagion, 17/3/2010:
25/3/2010: Influence Maximization, 24/3/2010
25/3/2010: Influence and Correlation, 24/3/2010
25/3/2010: Introduction to Community Detection, 24/3/2010
9/4/2010: Social Tagging Systems, 7/4/2010
21/4/2010: Query Logs, 14/4/2010
29/4/2010: Introduction
to Computational Advertising (slides from Stanford), 28/4/2010
1/6/2010: Marketplace
and Economics (slides from Stanford)
1/6/2010: Sponsored
Search (slides from Stanford)
29/4/2010: A
Crash Course in Information Retrieval (slides from Stanford), 28/4/2010