Events Calendar

AI Seminar-Using Friends as Sensors to Detect Global-Scale Contagious Outbreaks

Speaker: Esteban Moro, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Talk Title: Using Friends as Sensors to Detect Global-Scale Contagious Outbreaks

Series: Artificial Intelligence Seminar

Abstract: Recent research has focused on the monitoring of global-scale online data for improved detection of epidemics, mood patterns, movements in the stock market, political revolutions, box-office revenues, consumer behaviour and many other important phenomena. However, privacy considerations and the sheer scale of data available online are quickly making global monitoring infeasible, and existing methods do not take full advantage of local network structure to identify key nodes for monitoring. Here, we develop a model of the contagious spread of information in a global-scale, publicly-articulated social network and show that a simple method can yield not just early detection, but advance warning of contagious outbreaks. In this method, we randomly choose a small fraction of nodes in the network and then we randomly choose a "friend" of each node to include in a group for local monitoring. Using six months of data from most of the full Twittersphere, we show that this friend group is more central in the network and it helps us to detect viral outbreaks of the use of novel hashtags about 7 days earlier than we could with an equal-sized randomly chosen group. Moreover, the method actually works better than expected due to network structure alone because highly central actors are both more active and exhibit increased diversity in the information they transmit to others. These results suggest that local monitoring is not just more efficient, it is more effective, and it is possible that other contagious processes in global-scale networks may be similarly monitored. Finally, we show the effectiveness of the method in the recent Twitter activity during hurricane Sandy.



Biography: BSc in Physics (1994) from the University of Salamanca and PhD in Physics from the University Carlos III of Madrid (1999). Researcher at the University of Oxford (1999-2001) and Ramón y Cajal University Carlos III in Madrid (2003-2007). Associate Professor at Universidad Carlos III. He has published over 40 articles and have led and participated in over 20 projects funded by government and companies. His areas of interest are random processes, financial mathematics, viral marketing, social networks. He works as a consultant in social networks for the Institute of Knowledge Engineering. It was awarded "Shared University Award" from IBM in 2007 for modeling the spread of information in social networks and application to viral marketing. And Research Excellence Award in 2013 by the Carlos III University of Madrid.

Home Page/ Blog:
http://estebanmoro.org
markov.uc3m.es


Host: Kristina Lerman

Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=052c65d179f94ec995d9b00659196b761d

Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey

WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=052c65d179f94ec995d9b00659196b761d

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Peter Zamar