Seminar of Computer Networks: Online Social Networks and Network
Economics
Academic Year 2010 / 2011
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
26/6/2011: Solutions to Homework 2 are available:
Solutions
8/6/2011: On request Homework 2 has been revised. There are 5 problems altogether now from which you are supposed to solve 4.
Solutions are due on June 24 and can be
handed-in in office B118.
7/6/2011: The second homework is out and due on June 24. Solutions can be handed-in in office B118.
6/6/2011: We have posted a list of potenital projects to choose from. On Wednesday, 8/6 we
will have a short discussion about the projects.
24/5/2011: The solutions to the first
homework have been published.
9/5/2011: There was a mistake with the equations of Problem 5 in the first homework. Please download the updated version.
6/5/2011: There will be no classes on Monday, 16/5/2011 and Monday, 30/5/2011.
6/5/2011: Class notes available (will be updated weekly).
2/5/2011: Guido takes over classes.
19/4/2011: Aris will be out of Rome until the end of April. You can come
at office hours or email for an appointment for questions on the class
material or the homework after May 1st.
19/4/2011: The first homework is out and due on
May 18. It has 4 theoretical questions and a data-mining one. Read
carefully the instructions. If you do not have a partner and you would
like one, you can mail to
aris@cs.brown.edu to try to match you
up. Please start early, as the questions are not completely trivial.
11/4/2011: On Wednesday, 20/4/2011, since there is no available room at
the regular time, the class will be at 10.15-11.45 at Aula A7.
28/3/2011: On Wednesday, 30/3/2011, since there is no available room at
the regular time, the class will be at 3.45-5.15 at Aula A5.
28/3/2011: The class times are Monday, 3.45-5.15 (Aula A7) and Wednesday
2.00-3.30 (Aula A6).
23/3/2011: The class times are Monday, 3.45-5.15 and Wednesday 2.00-3.30,
in Room A7.
16/3/2011: There is no class on Monday 21/3. On Wednesday, 23/3 we have
class at 2.00-3.30, at Aula A7.
Instructors
Prof. Stefano Lenardi,
Sapienza University of Rome
Dr. Aris Anagnostopoulos,
Sapienza University of Rome,
email: aris@cs.brown.edu
Prof. Guido
Schäfer, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam
When and Where
When: Monday 15.45-17.15 (Aula A7) and Wednesday 14.00-15.30
(Aula A6).
Where: Via Ariosto 25, Aule A6, A7
Office Hours
Aris: Wednesday, after class, 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
- Auction theory
- Computational advertising
Homeworks, Exams
We will have two homework sets and a final project.
Homework 1 (updated 9/5) (due May 18, before class)
Solutions for Homework 1.
Homework 2 (due June 24)
Solutions for Homework 2.
Note that the final exams will be on June 28 and July 11, 2011.
Instructions for the final project.
Handouts
Background Meterial
15/3/2011: Basic combinatorics
Basic matirial for counting permutations and combinations, binomial
coefficients, etc.
15/3/2011: Introduction to probability
Here you can find a brief introduction to probability. Make sure that
you understand all the material.
15/3/2011: 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.
15/3/2011: 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.).
15/3/2011: Introduction, 14/3/2011: Introduction, structural
properties
23/3/2011: Probability, 16/3/2011: Basic discrete probability, random variables, expectation
6/4/2011: Introduction to Epidemics, 4/4/2011,
6/4/2011 (updated 6/4/2011)
6/4/2011: Influence Maximization, 6/4/2011
13/4/2011: Introduction to Community Detection
and Centrality, 11/4/2011, 13/4/2011