Dr. Ben

Dr. Le-Shin

Congratulations to Ben and Le-Shin — er, Dr. Markines and Dr. Wu! They both successfully defended their dissertations this summer, earning their PhD!

NaN had a strong presence at Hypertext 2009 in Torino:

• Mark’s paper What’s in a session: tracking individual behavior on the web was nominated for the Best Paper Award.
• Heather presented the demo Incentives for social annotation about the prototype Firefox extension for GiveALink.org, and the tagging game. (Heather is also demoing at SIGIR’09 in Boston.)
• I presented the demo Sixearch.org 2.0 peer application for collaborative web search about the latest release of Sixearch.
• Ben presented his poster on A scalable, collaborative similarity measure for social annotation systems.

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Fil Menczer is one of the organizers of Hypertext 2009, the 20th ACM Conference on Hypertext an Hypermedia. The conference will be held June 29-July 1 at the Villa Gualino Convention Centre, on the hills overlooking Torino, Italy. Hypertext is the main venue for high quality peer-reviewed research on “linking.” The Web, the Semantic Web, the Web 2.0, and Social Networks are all manifestations of the success of the link. With a 70% increase in submissions, Hypertext 2009 will have a strong and diverse technical program covering all research concerning links: their semantics, their presentation, the applications, as well as the knowledge that can be derived from their analysis and their effects on society. The conference will also feature demos, posters, a student research competition, four workshops, and keynotes by Lada Adamic and Ricardo Baeza-Yates.

Similarity Cloud for 'mac' vs 'pc'

Alessandro Flammini and Filippo Menczer, along with M. Ángeles Serrano from the University of Barcelona, have authored a paper entitled “Modeling Statistical Properties of Written Text” that has been published in the PLoS One. The paper introduces and validates a generative model that explains from simple rules the simultaneous emergence of patterns of written text observed in many languages. The paper focuses on the well-known Zipf’s law of word frequencies, as well as additional patterns such as Heaps’ law of word diversity, the bursty nature of rare words, and similarity among documents. Through their model, the researchers found a connection between word burstiness and the topicality of text. In addition, they identify dynamic word ranking and memory across documents as key mechanisms to explain the organization of written text. The semantic similarity between topics, which is one of the features that the model aims to explain, is visualized by the Similarity Cloud, an online tool developed by computer science graduate student Mark Meiss. The model developed by the researchers and the findings of this paper could lead to improved techniques for identifying key terms that capture the topics of a Web page, which is crucial for matching search queries to relevant results and ads. More…

Research and Creativity Activity profiles research by CNetS faculty Filippo Menczer and Alessandro Vespignani and their groups in a special issue on networks. More…

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Networks & agents Network

NaN is a research group exploring complex systems, adaptive agents, modeling, simulation, artificial life, and complex (information, biological, and social) networks. We especially focus on the Web as a complex information network in which we leave abundant traces of our social and semantic activities: what we do, what we are interested in, whom we talk to, what knowledge we acquire and contribute. Our research spans from modeling the dynamic processes that occur on the Web (how information networks grow and evolve, how individual and collective traffic patterns emerge, how attention bursts are generated and shaped by social and search tools) to designing tools that mine the Web to build better search, navigation, management, and recommendation tools (where ‘better’ means more intelligent, autonomous, robust, personalized, contextual, scalable, adaptive, and so on).

We have many ongoing collaborations with colleagues in the Complex Networks Lagrange Lab at the Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI) Foundation in Torino, Italy.

Active NaN projects

GiveALink

Sixearch

Web Traffic

Network Flow Analysis

Web Security

Web Dynamics

Search Bias

Text & Link Modeling

Archived NaN projects

InfoSpiders

Web Topologies

IntelliShopper

ELSA

LEE

BioNets

ACE

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The NaN-list is a low-traffic mailing list to route messages to NaN folks. Messages include meeting reminders and abstracts, calls for papers and participation of relevant conferences and journals, relevant job ads (postdoc, academic, industry research labs), pointers to relevant news and publications, and occasionally other announcements or requests.

If you wish to subscribe to the list, browse archives, send messages to the list, or manage your membership, go to mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/nan-list. Membership is moderated for spam prevention. If Fil does not know you, contact him after subscribing to explain who you are and why you want to join. Typically the list is open only to people with an IU affiliation and account.

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PI and Faculty Collaborators

Fil
Menczer (PI)

Sandro
Flammini

Alex
Vespignani

Luis
Rocha

Markus
Jakobsson

Graduate Students

Heather
Roinestad

Mark
Meiss

Ruj
Akavipat

Namrata
Lele

Jacob
Ratkiewicz

Michael
Conover

Alejandro
Valerio

Diep
Hoang

Vivek
Krishna

Lilian
Weng

Dimitar
Nikolov

Staff, Visitors, and Other Collaborators

John
Burgoon

Bruno
Gonçalves

Jose
Ramasco

Rossano
Schifanella

Ciro
Cattuto

Wouter Van
den Broeck

Mariangeles
Serrano

Santo
Fortunato

Nicola
Perra

Alumni

Le-Shin
Wu

Ben
Markines

Katrina
Panovich

Thomas
Reichherzer

Mira
Stoilova

Gayathri
Athreya

Dyvia
Rao

Ana
Maguitman

Tei
Laine

Alia Al Kasimi

Melania
Degeratu

Troy
Tassier

Gautam
Pant

Yong
Seog Kim