Graphical Recording of my talk at WIN'10. (by AlphaChimps)
A few days ago, I returned from “Workshop in Information in Networks”, where I had presented our paper Community Detection in Tagging-Induced Hypergraphs. It was a two-day workshop with an informal feel to it, celebrating interdisciplinarity and featuring research from physicists and historians, computer and political scientists all while being hosted at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
Short snapshot of what comes to my mind after almost two weeks now after browsing the program again (citations without guarantees):
- Duncan Watts on cascading in Twitter: “Almost nothing cascades”
- Nathan Eagle on real-world relevance of research: “The really hard questions come from people who want to know where to build a fountain to minimize diseases” (see also AI for Development – http://ai-d.org/)
- Stanley Wasserman polarizing on network researchers neglecting the roots of their field and hypothesis-driven (statistics) vs data-driven (data mining) research
- Jeff Nickerson employing Mechanical Turk for crowdsourced brainstorming
- Isabelle Stanton demonstrating the construction of random graphs with a given joint degree distribution
- Michael Kearns on coordination problems in networks, showing through elegant experiments how, e.g., “a well-connected, small elite can enforce their will against an unconnected majority”
- Neha Gondal showing how a network dataset of loans in renaissance Florance could be used to test various theories of the social dynamics of lending in that time
- Peter Boothe showing that 18 autonomous systems (ie ISPs etc) could together kill around 40% (or at least some ridiculously high number around there) of all internet traffic by turning off their systems
- Sinan Aral showing that susceptibility to peer pressure (as measured by following a Facebook recommendation) increases as the relationship status changes from single to married (most susceptible, though, are “it’s complicated”-customers)
One nice feature of the event was the facilitator/graphical recorder from http://www.alphachimp.com who made funny but amazingly effective sketches of the talks for documentation and later discussion. Above you find the recording of my talk, linking to the full set of recordings from the event at Flickr.