Events Calendar

NL Seminar: Fine Grained Temporal Patterns of Online Content Consumption

Speaker: Farshad Kooti, USC/ISI

Talk Title: Fine Grained Temporal Patterns of Online Content Consumption

Series: Natural Language Seminar

Abstract: Online activity is characterized by diurnal and weekly patterns, reflecting human circadian rhythms, sleep cycles, and social patterns of work and leisure. Using data from online social networking site Facebook, we uncover temporal patterns that take place at far shorter time scales. Specifically, we demonstrate fine-grained, within-session behavioral changes, where a session is defined as a period of time a user engages with Facebook before choosing to take a break. We show that over the course of a session, users spend less time consuming some types of content, such as textual posts, and preferentially consume more photos and videos. Moreover, users who spend more time engaging with Facebook have different patterns of session activity than the less-engaged users, a distinction that is already visible at the start of the session. We study activity patterns with respect to users demographic characteristics, such as age and gender, and show that age has a strong impact on within-session behavioral changes. Finally, we show that the temporal patterns we uncover help us more accurately predict the length of sessions on Facebook.



Biography: I am a third-year Computer Science PhD student at the University of Southern California USC, Information Sciences Institute ISI working under the supervision of Kristina Lerman. My main research interest is the study of large and complex datasets, especially data from online social networks, which includes the measurement and analysis of users' behavior in OSNs. I'm currently a Data Science intern at Facebook in Menlo Park. Before joining USC, I got my master's from Max Planck Institute for Software Systems MPI SWS, Germany. I worked with Krishna Gummadi as my advisor and also with Meeyoung Cha KAIST and Winter Mason Facebook during my master's. Before MPI, I got my bachelor's in Computer Engineering Software from University of Tehran, Iran.

Host: Nima Pourdamghani and Kevin Knight

More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Flr Conf Rm # 689, Marina Del Rey

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Peter Zamar

Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/