Complexity and Social Networks Blog

In a blog entry about a year ago I talked about using sensor data to change architecture into a changeable force for altering social networks. I recently analyzed the office layout data from 4 of our sociometric badge studies, and found that the probability of interaction between two people degraded greatly as the distance between their desks (as well as the physical barriers such as walls) increased.

I got fairly intrigued by the idea of dynamically modifying office layout to help deal with this situation, and recently for the Media Lab fall sponsor week my UROP Alex Speltz and I built a prototype of an augmented cubicle wall that changes based on the social context. Here's a picture:

The wall is a little over 2 meters tall and made of two plexiglass sheets with a wood frame. Inside the plexiglass sheets are window blinds that can be raised and lowered by an actuator mounted on the bottom of the wall.

The idea is that by detecting the stage of work for a worker (exploring vs. exploiting) we can determine if they need more face-to-face interaction or less for a certain period of time (probably at least a week). If someone needs to talk more with people around them, at night the actuator will pull down the blinds to create a window, making serendipitous interaction easier. If, on the other hand, the person is more in an exploit mode and needs to sit at their desk and work, the blinds are pulled up at night, and when they come in the next day it will give them more privacy. People can also specify their interaction preferences through a web-based system that my other UROPs Tim Kaler, Ernie Park, and Margaret Ding made, which allows us to further tailor the system output.

It's important to imagine an entire office outfitted with these, so if you knew that two groups were starting to work on a project together the barriers between those groups would disappear, while if someone was monopolizing the time of another group the barriers between them would increase. In effect, the augmented cubicle would become a social signal for availability. While people can control the blinds manually, in practice people stick with the defaults (I pulled down the blinds in my office two months ago and haven't gotten around to pulling them back up).

We're planning on deploying this in a real organization in the next few months as the design gets finalized to see if we can have a positive effect on the work environment, as well as productivity and job satisfaction. We're also currently making a demonstration video of the wall, which I'll post here as soon as it's ready.

Posted by Ben Waber at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

You Lie 2.0: How disrespect can get you thousands of new friends and a million dollars

At first, Congressman Joe Wilson's outburst during President Obama's health-care address looked like a career killer. Members of both parties blasted him for his dramatic breech of decorum, and most Americans, regardless of ideology, reacted with disgust.

But the South Carolina Republican used the incident to build a massive audience that has helped him raise more than a million dollars in new campaign funds. He's arguably more influential than ever before.

Welcome to Twitter-era politics, where a moment of fame -- even one as inglorious as Wilson's -- can translate into political power.

The night Wilson shouted "you lie" at the President of the United States, he hired a new-media strategist, who went to work immediately.

Within 24 hours, the Congressman's Twitter account had sent out 50 new messages, and his followers had increased by an unprecedented 500 percent to over 10,000.

Without any sincere apology to the American people or to his fellow Members of Congress, Wilson managed to create friends or, in Web 2.0 lingo, "picked up people" wherever they were -- on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

He replicated the Campaign 2.0 success of his political foe, President Obama, and increased his fans on his congressional Facebook fanpage to more than 11,000.

At the same time, he also equipped his Facebook campaign page with a donation option and added the following pitch:

"Washington Democrats and their liberal allies want to divert attention away from the concerns about the massive government takeover of health care. In fact, they have made me their Number One target -- already raising millions of dollars for my opponent. But I will not give up and I will not back down from our fight. We will not be muzzled. Will you please make a donation to help me fight back against these unwavering attacks? Thank you for standing with me in this fight.".

The result of the Congressman's breach of protocol and subsequent social-media broadcasts: Enormously enhanced name recognition and more than $1.5 million dollars in donations in the week following his outburst (and as of today $2.7 million).

What is most interesting here is how a whole new kind of message spin has emerged -- one that specifically focuses on targeting new media channels and is directed by a whole new kind of PR expert.

It's not just about talk radio and the Internet anymore. In the old days, Wilson's best course of action would have been to sincerely and thoughtfully apologize and then hope that his constituents would forgive him. Not any more: Today's messages are not about damage control but about turning a wrong into a right.

In other contexts, such misbehavior is not acceptable to anyone: Kanye West was shunned by his celebrity colleagues for jumping on stage at the VMA awards during Taylor Swift's acceptance speech; Serena Williams lost her match and received a fine of $10,500 dollars for insulting a line judge during the US Open finals on the same weekend.

Both found themselves in the dog house, both apologized profoundly, not only directly to the person they harmed, but also to the public. Their standings were arguably hurt by their behavior, while Wilson's appears to have been enhanced among those who share his views.

In a recent tweet, he says, "I will not back down from speaking the truth. Please stand with me.".

In Wilson's world, shouting at the president during an address to Congress is now called "speaking the truth." And by being able to communicate with thousands of followers directly on social networks, he can have his own version on the truth, unfiltered by journalists, academics, or pundits. He can directly spin the public, and doesn't need to worry nearly as much about spinning what we normally think of as the "opinion makers."

Democracy may well be better off as a result of the Internet's ability to build audience and supply that audience with direct, unfiltered communication. But as Wilson has shown, it is also a challenge for civil society, loosening norms of public behavior, and giving those who wish to cater to the extremes powerful new tools.

Posted by Ines Mergel at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

The CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) is using several different social media channels to inform about the swine flu besides the traditional (Web 1.0) channels, such as frequent press briefings, general information in audio and video, etc.:

1. Updates from the H1N1 page haven an RSS feed.


2. Frequent updates are spread using Twitter.


3. Video updates are posted using podcasts.


4. Image sharing on the CDCs Flickr site.


5. Buttons for your website.


6. Information sharing on MySpace's e-health page and daily strength group.


7. Updates can be shared using several different services (Google Reader, Bookmarks, Delicious, Facebook, Digg, etc.).


8. e-Cards to send by email to family members and friends to remind people to wash their hands.


9. Agencies can embed a flu widget on their page.

On the funny side: Do you have swine flu?

Posted by Ines Mergel at 7:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Human Dynamics Research Group at the MIT Media Laboratory is organizing a workshop on "Sensor-based Models and Feedback Systems for Social Computing" at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Social Computing in Vancouver, Canada.

We would like to invite paper submissions and welcome attendance at the workshop.

For more information please visit:

http://web.media.mit.edu/~taemie/socialCom09/

Posted by Ben Waber at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Speaking of contagion, there was an interesting piece in the Christian Science Monitor on the spread of viruses in social media, such as Facebook. Interestingly, this problem apparently increased substantially in 2008.

Let me make a short suggestion that there is an opportunity, with the social media, to better understand the epidemiology of computer viruses. In particular, environments such as Facebook are self contained, and have a great deal of information on the strength of relationships among individuals. Further, it should be possible, after the fact, to trace exactly when and where the virus was passed from one individual to another (difficult to do with viruses that affect humans). It should therefore be possible to link topology to spread in a fashion that is generally impossible. There is, in short, an opportunity to greatly advance understanding of contagion with data that companies like Facebook, Bebo, etc, have-- if anyone from these companies is reading, consider this a short research proposal ; - ).

Posted by David Lazer at 6:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Just a short post. Stumbled on an interesting article in Social Computing mag.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 7:21 AM | Permalink

I previously blogged about how environmental sensors could transform how we think about architecture and how this data could be combined with wearable sensors. At the Media Lab's Awareness event, held last Thursday, myself and other Media Lab researchers explored this in more detail. At this event, over 150 sponsors, students, and faculty wore Sociometric Badges for the entire day so that we could show how interactions and behavior varied across different areas of the lab during different parts of the day, as well as give people insights into how different companies behaved: do people from Hitachi and Canon have similar behavior patterns? Do they see the same demos? We gave participants real time feedback on displays scattered around the lab. Here's a screenshot, but a video is coming:

This shows the activity in the different areas. Each circle represents a person, and circles grow as people stay in an area for longer. The solid portion of each circle indicates how much people are talking, and the color indicates how engaged that person is in talking (dark green implies not engaged, bright green is very engaged), which we extract in real time from the microphone on the badges. The circles also move around based on accelerometer activity, so the position information is only based on what basestation people were close to, giving us what room they were in.
Our badges interacted with Ubiquitous Sensor Portals created by the Responsive Environments group, which allowed people to browse video feeds of the building in real time. Eventually this system will enable interaction between the virtual world (i.e. Second Life) and the real world by allowing for voice communication through the portals to other portals or virtual partners in Second Life. Here's a picture of the portals:

At the end of the day we also gave participants feedback about their company's activity and companies that were similar to them. By using the badges to figure out who talked to whom, we grouped companies and people together that saw similar demos, met the same people, had similar behavioral patterns, etc. It was amazing that companies often had more in common with companies outside their industry than with those within it. We actually generated a network of interest similarity, which (not surprisingly) showed the Media Lab at the center with many other companies tapping in to a core of sponsors with many diverse interests, which were not always the companies with the most attendants. The personalized feedback was also very interesting, since we showed people who you may be interested in meeting based on the same features we used for companies. This appeared to work extremely well, since two other people in my research group appeared in my feedback even though I never interacted with them that day. While this information is not useful in and of itself, it did convince me of the system's effectiveness, which for users would help them trust other recommendations.

The point of all of this was not to show how this technology can impact a one-day event. After all, there's not much time for real-time reflection in one day. Instead we aimed to spark discussion about how continuous deployments of these systems could fundamentally change businesses and public spaces in general. Imagine continuous feedback on behavior, personally customized by you to help increase your productivity and effectiveness. Imagine spaces where the line between virtual and physical is blurred to the point where you can just as easily have a conversation with the person next to you as with the person next to you in the virtual representation of your building in Second Life. The Sensor Portals will continue to be active at the Media Lab, allowing us to continually tailor this system to be the most beneficial to users and further research.

We are also nearing deployment of our Sensible Organization tools in the laboratory of one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies as well as in the call center of a major financial firm. We hope to measure through these interventions whether or not we can raise productivity and enhance community within organizations, as well as answer deep theoretical questions on networks and behavior. In social network theory there is the frequent claim that central individuals tend to be more productive because they have access to more diverse information, but the causality issue has not been thoroughly studied. Maybe more productive people simply tend to be more central, so we should instead try to detect behavioral and psychological characteristics to create feedback systems. By creating recommendation systems that actually make individuals more central (see my paper describing this system), enabling us to give empirical support to theoretical arguments.

This technology will fundamentally change organizations and management as a whole, and this deployment is the first step in this direction. Over the next few months through longer term experiments we'll begin to learn exactly what this means, and how management practices can change to take advantage of this data while at the same time using it to empower employees to make the right decisions. Stay tuned.

Posted by Ben Waber at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

While working at the CeBit, the world's largest IT related fair, I stumbled upon Commetrix, a dynamic network visualization tool, developed by researchers from TU Berlin. The software allows to import data from discussion groups, VoIP, eMail, blogs or social networking sites. Moreover, besides the usual functionality such as centrality, density or zoom, it allows for a timed-based observation of network growth and a parallel visualization of the content (e.g. emails). The latter somehow reminded me of tag clouds although in a much more sophisticated way. Matthias, the project manager, presented a demo of one of their case studies of an Enron email dataset to underline the potential of the tool. The software is only available in English. The possibilities and usabilities were pretty impressive. Though I it would be interesting to hear the opinion from an expert of software in that area. (Please comment)

Researchers who would be interested in getting a copy of the software or learning more about it should contact Matthias Trier. You should also be able to find some of their work presented at HICSS and Sunbelt online.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My group at the MIT Media Lab has started conducting experiments using the Sociometric Badge, a sensing platform that logs voice features, proximity to other individuals, face-to-face interactions, and movement. We have finished analysis of data obtained in a preliminary study at a German bank’s marketing division, and the results were astonishing. We were also fortunate enough to get the e-mail logs for the bank over the course of the study.

For years e-mail data has been used as an easy to obtain proxy for social network information. We found, however, that in fact proximity is highly negatively correlated with e-mail use. We can attribute this to several factors. First, if you are in close proximity to another individual, it makes more sense to interact with them in the real world rather than send them an e-mail. Second, proximity information also picks up on informal relations, while in this particular organization e-mail is used mainly for business purposes. This is because if you spend a lot of time with someone you are more likely to be their friend and therefore less likely to send an e-mail to them. This result points towards the necessity of having face-to-face interaction information in order to have a full view of the social network.

When we combined face-to-face interaction information (which we used to create a social network representation) with e-mail data we got a more complete view of the social network that exhibited some interesting properties. Most notably, betweenness in the social network and total communication were both highly negatively correlated with the perceived quality of interactions. These two measures, however, were not significantly correlated with each other. This points to the necessity of aiding central actors in managing their interaction-related stress, since it is evident that those who are overburdened with their communication responsibilities feel that their interaction quality similarly degrades.

These results strongly argue for the use of automatic sensing data for computational social science. We report many other interesting findings in a paper that will appear in the NetSci 2007 conference.

Posted by Ben Waber at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The new generation of video game consoles like Xbox360, PS3 or WII go beyond being a platform for games. You may run various software, listen to music or watch movies. Of course all of these consoles can connect to the internet. The industry would like the consoles to be something like the iPod for your home as they have greater control on our behavior and supply side compare to a PC. In addition, the power of todays consoles' processor is so powerful that a network of up to 11-12.000 idle PS3 users support Stanford's Folding@Home project (understand protein folding an related diseases) at any time. Sony is already thinking of other ways in utilizing the network in commercial ways. Any ideas? Please comment.

Finally, here is a list of distributed computing projects. Parents should still be sceptical if kids ask for a video game console to conduct scientific research. :-).

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 12:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

In case you have nothing to do this Sunday, here is a short follow up on the DLD conference 2007 which I noted in an earlier entry. There was a panel with Erik Wachtmeister (asmallworld), Lars Hinrichs (xing) and Matt Cohler (facbook) which covered various aspects of social networking platforms (i.e. business models, future). Here is a link to the full video of the DLD social network panel discussion "The Link Society" moderated by former Alando and Jamba founder Oliver Samwer. In order to watch the video please click "Monday - January 22" on the navigation bar on the right, scroll down to "10:30 am The Link Society" and then just click on "Play video".

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The PEW Internet & American Life Project has just published a new study on Online Social Networking Websites and Youth.

They define online social networking websites as:

A social networking site is an online place where a user can create a profile and build a personal network that connects him or her to other users.

One of the main and interesting findings is that 55% of the teens between 12-17 are using social networking platforms to connect with their friends online - girls mainly to reinforce existing relationships and boys more to connect to new friends or dating purposes. The findings also show, that 82% of the respondents said, that they are using online social networking sites to stay in contact with friends who they rarely see.

This supports the theory in our working paper on the sustainability of online ties, that social networking platforms can support the maintenance of existing ties or to reconnect with former friends. See my earlier entry on the sustainability of online ties here on the IQ blog and also on my social networking blog.

Posted by Ines Mergel at 5:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Wanted to spread the word that we are now launching EPROM (Entrepreneurial Programming and Research On Mobiles) jointly at MIT and the University of Nairobi. The premise behind the project comes from the fact that today’s mobile phones are designed to meet Western needs. Subscribers in developing countries, however, now represent the majority of mobile phone users worldwide (1.4 billion mobile phone subscribers live in the developing world!). We have put particular emphasis on Africa because it is currently the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world, and I’ve moved to Kenya for the year to get the project off the ground.

What Kenyans are starting to do with their phones is amazing. Today, in my small town of Kilifi, I can buy milk, pay for a taxi ride, even check the local vegetable prices on my mobile... I describe this phenomenon in more detail here.

To further our understanding of the underlying factors driving entrepreneurship using mobile phones, we are involving several students as research assistants to pursue research on behavioral and mobile phone usage patterns. We will be distributing Nokia ‘smartphones’ to fifty individuals in different demographics and log their behavior over the course of six months. The phones will have a custom application that continuously logs location, nearby peers, communication and phone usage statistics, similar to the data collected for 100 people during the Reality Mining project at MIT. In this previous research, we generated models of our subjects’ lives with such precision that they could be used to accurately predict subsequent behavior. Based solely on data logged by our custom phone application, we have successfully shown that after two months logging it is possible not only to predict behavior, but also to infer friendships, differentiate demographics, validate survey responses, and even quantify the dynamics of an organization. It is our hope that this data will provide an analogous quantitative description of Kenyan social networks and mobile phone usage behaviors.

Cheers from Kenya...

Posted by Nathan Eagle at 7:53 AM | Permalink

I’m beginning a collaboration with British Telecom in an effort to analyze their massive call network dataset. This is a dynamic, directed network that contains ~250 million nodes (ie: distinct phone numbers) and ~2000-5000 edges (ie: calls) generated each second. The phone numbers are of course one-way hashed such that it is impossible to link a node’s identifier to an actual phone number. However we do have information about the country and region to which the node belongs (ie: country code / area code). While it is not inclusive of every call to and from the UK, it is estimated that the dataset includes approximately 80% of landline calls and 30% of mobile calls.

So my question to the complex systems / social network community is this: what are some questions we should attempt to ask of this dataset? Possible examples include calculating the strength of a particular region’s relationships with other regions and countries, analyzing the dynamics involved in “call cascades�, inferring the average size of an individual’s hierarchical social groups (from close friend to possible acquaintance), etc...

While many metrics may be impossible to calculate for a network of this magnitude, simple sampling can yield interesting results. For example, the plot above represents the duration of outgoing calls from 100,000 randomly sampled nodes during 6 month intervals over the course of October 1995 to March 1998. It is clear that there are an increasing number of very long calls (over 10^4.2 seconds ~ 4.5 hours) which could be a good indicator of the uptake of dial-up internet in the UK during this timeframe.

Posted by Nathan Eagle at 9:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Social relations between individuals can be complex systems. How the structure of social networks impacts the behaviour of a system has been researched recently. These are i.e. power grids, neural networks, the World Wide Web or stock markets. Although different in the underlying interaction dynamics or micro-physics, all these networks have shown a tendency to self-organize in structures that share common features. In particular, the number of connections, for each element, or node, of the network follow a power law distribution. Networks that fulfill this property are referred to as scale-free (SF) networks M. Bartolozzi, D. B. Leinweber1, A. W. Thomas. (2005).

I would like to draw your attention to 2 projects which are using the power law in a direct and indirect way. First, there is the use of virtual stock markets to improve market research. Second, a recent project concerning blogs and virtual stock markets (VSMs) tries to proove the existence of powerlaw.

Continue reading "Virtual Stock Markets - Proving the Powerlaw?" »

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 5:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As a way of introducing myself to this blog, I'm posting an interview that I recently did for a radio show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). This interview is part of a series about fellows at Massey College, University of Toronto. The interview focuses on my research – how people maintain their relationships by way of the internet. I hope you enjoy. To Listen, Click Here.

Posted by Jeff Boase at 10:55 PM | Permalink

When it comes to social software, a myriad of platforms and websites sprang out of the ground during the last couple of years: The Social Networking Services Meta list shows 380 different social networking platforms, covering interest areas such as business networking, dating, friend networking, pet networking, photo sharing or face-to-face facilitating sites.

It seems as if all these content areas are targeting different user groups, therefore different social circles in which the users are active.

Even though, it might be that some of the circles have overlapping neighborhoods of actors, it is more likely, that people would chose different social networking platforms for different purposes: for example, A might probably want to connect to B for dating purposes on a different platform than the one he uses with C for business contacts.

This leads to my question: Are people changing their personality (or at least are they (inter)acting differently, displaying different kinds of information = showing a different face) on different platforms? If so, where are the differences and why are they occurring?

One way of analyzing these differences would be a) to conduct a self-study or b) to collect data on people that you know of who signed up for different platforms. What would be a robust way to analyze these differences?

Looking forward to your comments :)

Posted by Ines Mergel at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)