Location: Maxwell Dworkin G115, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge MA 02138
Speakers: Aaron Adcock and Shankar Kalyanaraman (Facebook)
Time: Informal lunch with speaker, 12:30pm; talk, 1:00pm
Talk 1: Tree-like Structure in Social and Information Networks
Presenter: Aaron Adcock
It is often noted that social and information networks exhibit tree-like structure and properties. In the past few years several tools have been developed to more closely quantify this structure. I will discuss some of the results of applying these tools to real-world social and information networks. In particular, I will discuss two alternatives for measuring this structure: Gromov hyperbolicity and tree-width.
Talk 2:
Data-mining for development
Presenter: Shankar Kalyanaraman
Over the last few years, we have witnessed innovative uses of big data to model and predict complex human behavior and patterns. Google's use of search query data to accurately forecast flu incidence and Ushahidi's crowdsourced crisis maps following the Haiti earthquake in 2010 for quicker and more effective deployment of humanitarian aid are two leading examples in this domain. My research interests draw inspiration from these examples; and in this talk, I will showcase some previous work I have done in disease surveillance and post-conflict violence prevention.
In the end, time-permitting, we’ll briefly chat about data science at Facebook.