The Social Relationship: Issues of Representation
In recent years, the domain of social network analysis (SNA) has become very popular among research communities outside the traditional SNA community in sociology. From the perspective of the sociologists, this has been a mixed blessing. The discipline of SNA, having a strong computational basis, stands to benefit from additional perspectives from other fields. Yet far too often, to the dismay of the sociologists, there is a lack of recognition of the importance of representational choices made prior to analysis.
Social Relationship Identification: Defining the Task
In recent years, informal, online communication has transformed the way we connect and collaborate with others. Through a range of online communication technologies, we are able to enrich existing social relationships and establish new relationships that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to develop offline. Now that storage has become vast and inexpensive, much of this data will be archived for years to come. This provides new opportunities and new challenges.
Neighborhood Networks
Not long after I moved into my new apartment, I experienced three separate power outages of significant duration within the span of 24 hours. Since my iPhone was charged and AT&T’s network remained operational, I was able to connect with the outside world and inquire about the situation. Given I now live in an area that is primed for earthquakes at any time, I’ve thought about how bad the situation could become if a significant event took place.
Weaving Trust Networks
Several years ago, I had the opportunity to listen to a retired Marine general who, upon leaving the military, continued to pursue his passion in the area of strategic collaboration. During the course of his military career, at various levels of command, he had seen and wrestled with the challenges of orchestrating the actions of multiple civilian and military organizations in dynamic, uncertain environments. During his presentation, his objective was to discuss the wicked hard problems in the extreme scenarios of disaster recovery and reconstruction events such as post-Hurricane Katrina operations and Iraq reconstruction.
Honest Signals
Each one of us has had the experience. We meet someone for the first time and immediately feel a resonance. We talk about how some people simply radiate, creating a presence that is hard to ignore. The nonverbal communication channel is powerful and shapes outcomes in social situations in profound ways. In recent years, Sandy Pentland’s research group at the MIT Media Lab has been systematically studying this communication pathway and characterizing more precisely the impact honest signals have.
Mobile Phone Entrepreneurship in the Developing World
This morning, I’ve been reading about an exciting ongoing project called EPROM (Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles) that is focused on fostering mobile-phone related research and entrepreneurship in the developing world. The EPROM project is lead by Nathan Eagle, whose seminal Ph.D. research at the MIT Media Laboratory focused on understanding complex human dynamics from social interaction data derived from mobile devices. To fully appreciate the motivation for EPROM, it is important to consider the trends within Africa.
Empowering Citizens
As Hurricane Gustav bears down on Louisiana, I can not help but think about the challenges of disaster response and how I believe we as a nation can do better. I believe communication technology, including social media, has an important role in this equation. Yet the most fundamental shift that is required is one of mindset. Following September 11th, the push for homeland security has focused significantly on deploying technology to enhance the capabilities of security personnel and first responders to prevent or mitigate the impact of threats to the nation, whether natural or man-made.
Social Transparency and Latent Group Discovery
In March 2008, I participated in the AAAI Spring Symposium on Social Information Processing organized by Kristina Lerman (USC Information Sciences Institute), David Gutelius (Social Kinetics), Bernardo Huberman (HP Labs) and Srujana Merugu (Yahoo). The event brought together a very interesting mix of researchers investigating social media and the dynamic, emergent communities that are enabled by these technologies. Among the host of intriguing presentations, one in particular that caught my attention was given by Ed Chi from PARC.
Crowdsourcing Cyberwar
On April 27, 2007, the Estonian government moved a controversial bronze statue of a Soviet soldier from its long-time resting place to a military graveyard outside the capital city of Tallinn. After 15 years of independence from the former Soviet Union, the government finally decided to take action to place this troubling symbol in a more remote location. The reaction from the Russian minority was swift, with rioting and looting of downtown Tallinn that lasted for days. Along with chaos in the streets came the beginning of a protracted cyberriot known now as the first Internet war.