Cyber-social Computing

The aim of the module is to provide an overview of the variety of cyber-social computing applications of which some are current and some are emerging. Concepts underlying cyber-social computing applications are studied to highlight important paradigms, techniques and trends.

Social entities can be individuals, organizations or any other artificial society, where cyber-social computing arises from the interaction between the social relationships among social entities in the cyber world. This module will give students the knowledge, understanding and skill to consider how social relationships and individual preferences can be modelled, represented, and reasoned about, and how interactions among social entities can be used in computations to solve real-world problems.

An understanding of the research context and potential future directions for these technologies will be developed throughout. The cyber-social computing module supports the aims of the 4th industrial revolution social computing architectures and solutions for e.g. the Internet of Things

The following topics can be covered:

• Social graphs

• Social network metrics

• Network models

• Reputation and recommendation systems

• Link prediction/community detection

Practical project:

Network simulation in NetLogo demonstrating a number of social network aspects