SIGSNA research project

International Workshop on Complex Social Network Analysis (CSNA 2012) @ ASONAM12

admin — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 11:14:35 +0000

On Sep. 26th we’ve been in Istanbul for the ASONAM 2012 conference. The Conference was interesting with many good papers and (may too many) different sessions. Beside attending the conference we had a extra motivation to be there. We were the organizers of the first International Workshop on Complex Social Network Analysis (together with Prof. Przemyslaw Kazienko, Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland). The workshop was a success and we’ve been pretty satisfied with the quality of the papers. One of our goals was to bring together – under the forming notion of complex social networks – a wide range of scholars coming from many different areas. Judging the results obtained this year we can be satisfied even if the computer scientists are still the majority.
So that’s the plan for the second edition: more Sociologists and Social Scientists. And you really should start working on your paper because ASONAM2013 will be at the Niagara Falls!

ICWSM12 conference paper available

admin — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 16:42:52 +0000

Thanks to the great AAAI digital library the ICWSM12 conference version of our paper “Conversation Practices and Network Structure in Twitter” is now available. You really should check out all the papers (short and full) that have been presented in Dublin.
Here you can see the poster that we’ve presented there:

Conversation practices and network structure in Twitter – SIGSNA paper at ICWSM12

admin — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:21:54 +0000

Our paper Conversation practices and network structure in Twitter has been accepted as poster paper for the upcoming International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM12) that will be held in Dublin in June. We are really happy to be part of the conference of many reasons. On one side ICWSM is an interesting venue where researchers coming both from the computer sciences and from the social sciences have the opportunity to come together presenting their own researches and approaches. As we know from our personal experience that is not an easy dialogue but it is really valuable.

At the same time we are really happy about our paper Conversation practices and network structure in Twitter that deals with an intriguing and still largely unexplored aspect of Twitter: if and why the participation to hashtag conversation leads to the acquisition of new followers. While the topic might seem very specific it might be a first step toward the construction of connections between those researches based on the analysis of hashtag-based conversation and those based on the analysis of following network.

We are going to publish – as usual – a preprin version of the paper as soon as possible.

Upcoming conferences and activities

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:28:40 +0000

After some quite time we can now update the list of the upcoming event and presentations. March will be a busy period with a major conference and two very interesting workshops where we are going to presents the new research lines we’re carrying on this year. Between the 12th and the 18th of March we are going to attend the XXXII Sunbelt conference at Redondo Beach, CA. During the conference we’re presenting some new empirical data about on the Multy-Layer Model for SNS analysis.
As soon as we’ll be back in Europe we will attend the 2nd Düsseldorf Workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Twitter Analysis (#diata12) where we will introduce our new research aimed at understanding how the Twitter network structure evolves according to the social interaction that takes place between the users (we hope to be able to post more about this really soon).

Information monitoring, propagation analysis and community detection in Social Network Sites

admin — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 08:22:50 +0000

[Italian version]

We are happy to announce that the SIGSNA team has just been awarded of some new research funds. The funds coming from the FIRB – future in research - funding action of the Italian Minister of Research and University are awarded only to young researcher under the age of 32 yo.
Our research project: “Information monitoring, propagation analysis and community detection in Social Network Sites ” brings the work we’ve done so far to a next level aiming at working within a multiple SNSs scenario.
The main objectives of this project are:
1) The development of monitoring tools and models, to filter relevant messages among millions of textual interactions and to identify distributed conversations made
of these messages.
2) The study of how information propagates in SNSs, following complementary approaches: the evaluation of mathematical propagation models on real data, the
identification of propagation patterns and the development of sociological models to explain these patterns.
3) The definition of new metrics to provide meaningful descriptions of large SNSs and their application to identify communities and other relevant structures hidden
inside the networks.

The project – as well as the SIGSNA prject – is based on a collaboration between the Department of Communication Studies of the University of Urbino and the Department of Computer Science of the University of Bologna.

The length of the FIRB research funds (3 years) and the large amount of funds (approx. 760K USD) will allow us to move deeper into the direction of high performance computing techniques applied to social network data. This is a research direction that we barely started and that seems to be quite promising.

PRIN: Online social relations and identity: Italian experience in Social Network Sites.

admin — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 07:55:48 +0000

We are happy to announce that the SIGSNA team is now officially part of a larger research group, counting 5 Italian universities (University of Urbino, University of Bologna, Catholic University of Milano, University of Bergamo, Calabria University), that has recently been awarded of PRIN research funds for the project: Online social relations and identity: Italian experience in Social Network Sites.
PRIN (short for the Italian version of: Research project of national interest) funds are awarded to large research group working of high level projects. The Online Social Relations and Identity project aims at investigating how social relations are reshaped and constructed Online. The research will focus on Italian people and will use Social Network Sites (SNS) as selected online environment for observation. Research methodology will be based on an advanced interdisciplinary approach based both on quantitative computer-driven analysis and on qualitative sociological analysis. This is obviously where all the expertise we’ve collected within the SIGNSA group will be most valuable.
The main research questions of the project are:
- What kinds of communication practices support social relationships in SNSs?
- What is the role of media production, fruition and sharing in this context?
- What kinds of practices support the public self-narration of users’ identity in SNSS?
- How is the distinction between private and public space being reshaped in SNSs? How this distinction in strategically used by users?
- How emotional relations (such as friendships or family) are redefined in SNSs?
In addition to that, since the research will use a large amount of automatically extracted data form SNS, a methodological question will be risen:
- What is an effective way to combine computer-based analysis of large quantity of SNS data with in-depth sociological interviews?

While ad ad hoc web site of the project will be established soon, we’re keeping publishing any relevant update also here.

ASONAM 2011 – Best Paper Award!

admin — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 05:47:49 +0000

Multi-Layer Networks: data available

matteo — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 05:27:35 +0000

We have made the data of our latest work on multi-layer networks available in the Data section. The zip file contains two networks in cvs format, one between twitter users and the other between friendfeed users, and a file with account correspondences indicating pairs of accounts in twitter and friendfeed belonging to the same person. We will add new networks in a while so stay tuned!

And since we’re having a great time in Kaohsiung we are very happy to publish a picture of us with the great staff of the conference.

The ML-model for multi-layer social networks

admin — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 08:19:09 +0000

In few weeks we’re going to Kaohsiung, Taiwan to present at the International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2011). We’re really excited about this conference (last year was great!) and we want to share the paper we’re presenting. It’s been a while since we’ve started working on the ML model (multi-layer model) as a better way to describe and measure our contemporary SNSs experience. With the variety and different strengths of different social networking online services we are using today, it is becoming increasingly common to have different online networks supporting different functions. For instance, facebook can be used to interact with friends and family, Twitter can be used to broadcast to the world and LinkedIn can be used with colleagues and business partners. Given this scenario the traditional SNA approach catches only one small part of the complex system of interconnected networks we’re part of. The ML model proposes a way to keep several networks together while performing SNA analysis.
The model is just a first step but we hope, as one of the reviewers said, “to have scratched the tip of a potentially big iceberg”.

Read the paper [PDF]

Ustation interviews Matteo about the SIGSNA project

admin — Thu, 12 May 2011 12:17:55 +0000

Ustation – national webzine about university – recently made a long interview with Matteo about the SIGSNA project. The interview (in Italian) is available on their website and can be listened here: