seminar: Online Social Networks: Research Challenges and some Results
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Wednesday, October 21, 2009 |
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Online Social Networks: Research Challenges and some Results |
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Peter Marbach, Associate Professor, Computer Science, University of Toronto |
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12:00pm |
Talk Abstract
Online social networks have revolutionized the way we interact and share information over the Internet. Popular social networking applications include YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, which support millions of active users. While being enormously popular, these applications only scratch the surface of what is possible to do, and there are tremendous opportunities in developing new, more advanced online social networking applications. Creating such applications poses new and fascinating research problems. One of major research challenges in this domain is to develop a formal understanding of online social networks both in terms of how online social networks are formed, and how they can be used to efficiently share and distribute information.
In the talk, we will discuss research aiming at creating a mathematical foundation of online social networks that provides a formal understanding and framework for the design and analysis of algorithms for online social networking applications. The first part of the talk will present a broader research agenda for online social network. The second part will focus on recent theoretical results on search algorithms in online social networks. An interesting aspect of the results that we obtain is that they provide insight into why real-life social networks are so efficient.
Speaker Bio
Peter Marbach was born in Lucerne, Switzerland. He received the Eidg.
Dipl. El.-Ing. (1993) from the ETH Zurich, Switzerland, the M.S. (1994)
in electrical engineering from the Columbia University, NY, U.S.A, and
the Ph.D. (1998) in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. He was
appointed as assistant professor in 2000, and associate professor in
2005, at the Department of Computer Science of the University of
Toronto. He has also been a visiting professor at Microsoft Research,
Cambridge, UK, at the Ecole Polytechnique Federal at Lausanne (EPFL),
Switzerland, and at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, France, and a
post-doctoral fellow at Cambridge University, UK.
Peter Marbach has received the IEEE INFOCOM 2002 Best Paper Award for
his paper "Priority Service and Max-Min Fairness". He is on the
editorial board of the ACM/IEEE Transactions of Networking. His research
interests are in the fields of communication networks, in particular in
the area of wireless networks, peer-to-peer networks, and online social
networks.