Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research

Channel 13 video

A report on the popularity of Twitter at IU (which ranks among the top 10 universities on a number of metrics) has sparked some interest in the local media about work CNetS researchers are going on Twitter usage. An interview with Filippo Menczer, associate director of CNetS, appeared on the front page of the Herald-Times on Oct 16, 2009. Indianapolis NBC affiliate Channel 13 interviewed Menczer and CNetS postdoc Bruno Gonçalves for their news program that night. The story was also picked up by the Chicago Tribune, US News & World Report, The Republic, Indianapolis Star, NewsDay, Courier-Journal, Indianapolis Business Journal, News-Sentinel, WIBC, The Indy Channel, WHAS, Journal & Courier, Palladium-Item, Star Press, and IDS.

I gave four invited talks in Spain, Italy, and Switzerland this summer:

• June 18: Social similarity at Yahoo! Labs Barcelona (host: Ricardo Baeza-Yates) — this is where I got the idea of a foosball table in the lab…
• June 19: Dynamics of Online Popularity at the University of Barcelona’s Department of Fundamental Physics (host: Marian Boguna)
• June 25: Social similarity at DEI, Politecnico di Milano (host: Stefano Ceri)
• June 26: Modeling text generation at the Faculty of Informatics, University of Lugano (host: Fabio Crestani)

Thanks to my wonderful hosts and their groups for engaging discussions and delightful  hospitality!

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.

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

Link analysis algorithms leverage hyperlinks created by authors as semantic endorsements between pages, while social bookmarks provide a way to leverage annotations by information consumers as a source of information about pages. This project explores a novel approach that is a synergy of the two: soliciting annotations from users about the content of pages, in a way that implicitly forms networks of relationships between and among resources and tags. These socially generated relationships are then aggregated to build bottom-up, global semantic similarity networks. Algorithms are developed to construct, analyze, and mine these networks in support of search and recommendation applications, exploratory navigation interfaces, resource management utilities, tag spam detection, and incentive games to accelerate the achievement of critical mass.

To extrapolate both annotations about content (tags) and semantic relationships (similarity) from single users to the “wisdom of the crowd,” the project investigates an information-theoretic model that extracts semantic assessments from information structures that many users are already maintaining, namely the bookmarks and tags they manage on their browsers or online. This entails the design and evaluation of several network-based measures and algorithms, such as similarity, novelty, centrality, and focus. Among the aims of this model are the exploration of the duality between resources (URLs) and concepts (tags or categories) and the integration of social annotation and collaborative filtering. One way to provide users with immediate value is to integrate client-based taxonomies and server-based folksonomies for social bookmark management. Both traditional users of browser bookmarks and social users of online bookmarks can take advantage of the same semantic maps while retaining the convenience of intuitive browser interfaces and centralized storage.

Strategic collaborations to share data, accelerate evaluation, and maximize impact are under way with key groups in Europe through the TAGora Project and its partners at Rome Sapienza, Sony Paris, the ISI Foundation in Torino, and the BibSonomy group at Kassel University. GiveALink.org (supported by a wonderful computing and storage infrastructure) is an open social bookmarking platform developed to experiment with and demonstrate the ideas of this project. The algorithms and data generated by the project are made available to the Web community to facilitate analysis, the development of improved network algorithms, and integration with other Internet applications. Early results of this project have been presented at various conferences and workshops including LinkKDD2005, AAAI2006, and HT2008. More recent publications are listed below. To learn more, donate your bookmarks, play with our system, and download our data and applications please visit GiveALink.org.

Project Members

Fil Menczer (PI)

Ben Markines

Heather Roinestad

John Burgoon (Web developer)

Li(Lilian) Weng

Collaborators & Alumni:

Rossano Schifanella

Wouter Van den Broeck

Ciro Cattuto

Katrina Panovich

Jacob Ratkiewicz

Mira Stoilova

We should also acknowledge Todd Holloway for his contributions to the early search engine; Luis Rocha and Ana Maguitman for suggesting the idea of ranking and searching by novelty; Mark Meiss, who thought of the catchy name for GiveALink; and Rob Henderson, quite possibly the greatest sysadmin around.

Project Publications

• Roinestad, H, Burgoon, J, Markines, B, and Menczer, F (2009).
  Incentives for Social Annotation (Demo).
  Proc. 32nd Annual ACM SIGIR Conference.
• Markines, B and Menczer, F (2009).

  A Scalable, Collaborative Similarity Measure for Social Annotation Systems.

  Proc. 20th ACM Conf. on Hypertext and Hypermedia (HT).

  [link]
• Roinestad, H, Burgoon, J, Markines, B, and Menczer, F (2009).

  Incentives for Social Annotation (Demo).

  Proc. 20th ACM Conf. on Hypertext and Hypermedia (HT).

  [link]
• Markines, B., Cattuto, C., and Menczer, F. (2009).

  Social Spam Detection.

  Proc. Fifth International Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web (AIRWeb).

  [link]
• Markines, B., Cattuto, C., Menczer, F., Benz, D., Hotho, A., and Stumme, G. (2009).

  Evaluating Similarity Measures for Emergent Semantics of Social Tagging.

  Proc. 18th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW).

  [link]

Social Spam Dataset

Wiki (team only)

Support

This project is supported by the National Science Foundation under award IIS-0811994: Social Integration of Semantic Annotation Networks for Web Applications. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Fil Menczer recently received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate the Social Integration of Semantic Annotation Networks for Web Applications. The project brings together complex networks and Web mining techniques to develop a new generation of search engines and collaborative Web applications such as GiveALink.org. The researchers will leverage existing annotations from users (such as the bookmarks they already maintain on their browsers) and elicit new ones through useful tools and games. The research will lead to a framework for building and maintaining socio-semantic networks of relationships between, and among, users, tags, and Web sites. In the end, these networks will improve social Web applications such as search, recommendation, spam detection, and exploratory navigation interfaces. More…

This sabbatical is providing wonderful opportunities for me to present our work and establish/strengthen collaborations with several groups in Italy. Recently I have given invited seminars on social search at the Department of Informatics at the University of Torino (hosts Matteo Sereno and Mino Anglano) and on Web traffic at the Department of Math at the University of Padova (host Massimo Marchiori). In the next few weeks I will give a talk on social search at the Department of Informatics and Information Science at the University of Genova (host Marina Ribaudo) and one on search engine bias and Web modeling at my old stomping ground, the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the National Research Council in Rome (host my undergraduate advisor and mentor Domenico Parisi).

I just got back from a visit to Yahoo! Research Silicon Valley. I gave two talks presenting our work on social search and web traffic analysis, and met lots of interesting people. They have an amazing group and of course mountains of data to lust after. Hopefully this will lead to collaborations in the future, given the many intersecting research interests.

Our study on social phishing in Comm. of the ACM 50(10):94-100, 2007 was one of the most downloaded CACM papers in 2007. It was reported by the Associated Press (picked up by over 100 news sources including Washington Post, LA Times, MSNBC, BusinessWeek, USA Today, Philadelphia Inquirer, Fox News, Forbes, Seattle Post Intelligencer, Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, Denver Post, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Ottawa Recorder, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Houston Chronicle, Philadelphia Daily News, etc.), Sole 24 Ore (Italy), Herald-Times, Reporter-Times, Cox News (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dayton Daily News, Austin American-Statesman etc.), PhysOrg, Inside INdiana Business, IDS, ACM TechNews, and Digg. Early reports of the experiment sparked a debate in local and online media (first page of the IDS 26 April 2005 and again April 28, one editorial April 27, WTIU news forum, and Slahdot).