 Speaker: Xiaolin Shi, Stanford University Date: Thursday, 24 February 2011, 9:00-10:00am Venue: Meeting Room 4-4 Abstract: The recent shift of human interaction to the web and online environment presents an unprecedented opportunity to study large-scale social networks and dynamics of human behavior within them. By studying the aggregated behavior of large groups of online users, we are able to uncover interesting behavioral patterns and underlying mechanisms that cannot be observed by examining individual behavior only. In this talk, I will present two related research lines that study aggregated social behavior in information systems. The first is social network analysis. I will give a brief overview of research in social networks as well as an example, which links the behavior that a user will join a group with the features of both the user’s social network and of the group she might join. The second line is the wisdom of crowds. I will show that in the system of an online peer-to-peer loan service, the aggregated dynamic bidding behavior of users reliably predicts the market success of requested loans. Short Bio: Dr. Xiaolin Shi is a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. Her research interests focus on information system and social network analysis, particularly on information dynamics in various types of online social and information networks and how they affect human behavior. Before joining Stanford, she obtained her PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan in July 2009. Her previous research projects have included characterizing the structural features of networks of online communities, studying the information diffusion patterns and modeling the dynamic process and human behavior in various information sharing networks. She is the recipient of the Douglas Engelbart Best Paper Award at the ACM Hypertext Conference in 2008. More information is available at: http://www.stanford.edu/~shixl/ |