Measurement Challenges in
Online Social Networks
Opinions by Stefan Saroiu
Microsoft Research
OSN Research Today
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What are the properties of the social graph?
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What are the properties of Web 2.0 apps?
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Including measuring these properties over time
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How does information propagate in social networks?
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What scalability issues today’s Web 2.0 sites are facing?
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Data partitioning seems to be a new problem
How can we leverage social trust to solve hard problems?
We are measuring and solving Internet problems!
Huge Opportunity
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Internet is changing!
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Insights
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Mobile computing brings us additional data source
Cloud computing brings us massive data aggregation
Understand how people interact & communicate
Implications
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Epidemiology, civil engineering, advertising
Huge opportunity to debunk myths
OSN Research Tomorrow
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How does the brain work?
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Why do we get sick?
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Brain: computing device with five inputs all injecting social data
Social behavior dictates encounter patterns and immune system
How should we design our infrastructure?
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Example: societal norms influence peak traffic times
Social context influences how people use shared infrastructure
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Systems can optimize based on this new type of info -- many opportunities
How do beliefs propagate?
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Is it the number of times a belief is heard or who you heard it from
Huge potential -- e.g., how to win an election? or what is religion?
How do we get from here to there?
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Challenge #1:
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Challenge #2:
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Question previous work rather than accept it
Challenge #3:
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Reward ambition
Broaden data scope to include real-world context
Challenge #4:
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Increase visibility of results