Abstract: In recent years social networking platforms have developed into extraordinary channels for spreading and consuming information.  Along with the rise of such infrastructure, there is continuous progress on techniques for spreading information effectively through influential users. In this talk we will introduce a new paradigm for optimizing information diffusion processes, called Adaptive Seeding.  The framework is designed to leverage a remarkable phenomenon in social networks, related to the "friendship paradox" (or "your friends have more friends than you").  We will discuss this structural phenomenon and present key algorithmic ideas and fundamental challenges of Adaptive Seeding. 

Speaker bio: Yaron Singer is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University.  He was previously a postdoctoral researcher at Google Research and obtained his PhD from UC Berkeley, where he was advised by Christos Papadimitriou.  He is the recipient of the 2012 Best Student Paper Award at the ACM conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), the 2010 Facebook Fellowship, the 2009 Microsoft Research Fellowship, and several entrepreneurial awards for work on advertising in social networks.