Invited Talk: Manuel Gómez Rodríguez. Max Planck Institute for Software Systems

Join us for an invited talk with Manuel Gómez Rodríguez of Max Planck Institute for Software Systems:

  • Title: Shaping Social Activity by Incentivizing Users.
  • Event Date: Tuesday, November 18; 2014, 12:00 pm.
  • Location: 4.2.E04 Room; Torres Quevedo Building; Leganés Campus; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

Abstract: Events in an online social network can be categorized roughly into endogenous events, where users just respond to the actions of their neighbors within the network, or exogenous events, where users take actions due to drives external to the network. How much external drive should be provided to each user, such that the network activity can be steered towards a target state? In this paper, we model social events using multivariate Hawkes processes, which can
capture both endogenous and exogenous event intensities, and derive a time dependent linear relation between the intensity of exogenous events and the overall network activity. Exploiting this connection, we develop a convex optimization framework for determining the required level of external drive in order for the network to reach a desired activity level. We experimented with event data gathered from Twitter, and show that our method can steer the activity of the network more accurately than alternatives.

Bio: Manuel Gomez Rodriguez is a tenure-track research group leader at Max Planck Institute for Software 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 arising in 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://www.mpi-sws.org/~manuelgr/.