On Wednesday March 19 at 7:00PM in Olin 321 the Mathematics and Computer Science Department will be hosting a talk by David Liben-Nowell of Carlton College.
Tracing Global-Scale Information Flow using Internet Chain-Letter Data
David Liben-Nowell
Carlton College
Although information, news, jokes, and opinions circulate continuously in the worldwide social network, the actual mechanics of how a single particular “meme” spreads on a global scale have largely remained mysterious. A major challenge lies in the difficulty of acquiring large-scale data that records the diffusion of a single piece of
information. In this talk, I will survey some recent computational research that studies information propagation through the digital traces of online activity. I will focus on joint work with Jon Kleinberg and Flavio Chierichetti that traces such information-spreading processes via the reconstruction of the propagation of two massively circulated Internet chain letters, one protesting the beginning of the Iraq war and one
protesting budget cuts in U.S. governmental funding of public radio.
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