Complexity and Social Networks Blog

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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)