Information Dynamics in a Socially Networked World
In this talk I will give a brief overview of projects past, present and future, in hopes of introducing you to my research and finding common interests that we can explore together during my visit this academic year. I study the way in which networks shape and are shaped by information. In the context of online question and answer forums and crowdsourcing sites, networks reveal who the experts are. In the context of online political discourse, networks reflect political ideologies. In general, simply observing the dynamic network of who communicates with whom can reveal properties, such as diversity and novelty, of the information that is flowing through and shaping the network. Networks not only transmit information, but modify it, sometimes generating viral memes. Finally, as useful as networks are in modeling information flow, they should not always be taken at face value, especially if they are generated by asking individuals to rate one another.
Due to emergency construction in South Hall, handicapped accessibility for this lecture is limited. Please call (510) 642-1464 for more information.
Lada Adamic is a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley School of Information and an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and Center for the Study of Complex Systems. She is also affiliated with EECS. Her research interests center on information dynamics in networks: how information diffuses, how it can be found, and how it influences the evolution of a network's structure. Her projects have included identifying expertise in online question and answer forums, studying the dynamics of viral marketing, and characterizing the structure in blogs and other online communities. She has received an NSF CAREER award, and best paper awards from Hypertext'08, ICWSM'10 and '11, and the most influential paper of the decade award from Web Intelligence'11.
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