Events Calendar

AI SEMINAR

Speaker: Manuel Gomez Rodriguez, Ph.D (MPI)

Talk Title: Modeling Diffusion of Competing Products and Conventions in Social Media

Series: AISeminar

Abstract: Abstract: The emergence and wide-spread use of social networks and
microblogging sites has led to a dramatic increase on the availability
of users' activity data. Importantly, this data can be exploited to
solve some of the problems that have captured the attention of
economists and marketers for decades as, e.g., product adoption,
product competition and product life cycle. In our work, we leverage
on users' activity data from a popular microblogging site to model and
predict the competing dynamics of products and social conventions
adoptions.

To this aim, we propose a data-driven model, based on continuous-time
Hawkes processes, for the adoption of competing products and
conventions. We then develop an inference method to efficiently fit
the model parameters by solving a convex program. The problem
decouples into a collection of smaller subproblems, thus scaling
easily to networks with hundred of thousands of nodes. We validate our
method over synthetic and real diffusion data gathered from Twitter,
and show that the proposed model does not only present a good
predictive power but also provides interpretable model parameters,
which allow us to gain insights into the fundamental principles that
drive product and convention adoptions.



Biography: Bio: Manuel Gomez Rodriguez is a Research Scientist at Max Planck
Institute for Intelligent Systems. Manuel develops machine learning
and large-scale data mining methods for the analysis and modeling of
large real-world networks and processes that take place over them. He
is particularly interested in problems motivated by the Web and social
media and has received several recognitions for his research,
including an Outstanding Paper Award at NIPS'13 and a Best Research
Paper Honorable Mention at KDD'10. Manuel holds a PhD in Electrical
Engineering from Stanford University and a BS in Electrical
Engineering from Carlos III University in Madrid (Spain). You can find
more about him at http://people.tuebingen.mpg.de/manuelgr/

Host: Greg Ver Steeg

Webcast: tba

Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 1135

WebCast Link: tba

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute