̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - social network

Target ‘best connected neighbours’ to stop spread of infection in developing countries

fpjl2 — Mon, 24 Jul 2017 19:04:04 +0000

Our lives benefit from social networks: the contact and dialogue between family, friends, colleagues and neighbours. However these networks can also cost lives by transmitting infection or misinformation, particularly in developing nations.

In fact, when there is an outbreak of disease, or of damaging rumour that hinders uptake of vaccination, the network through which it spreads needs to be broken up – and fast.

But who are the people with most connections – the ‘hubs’ in any social network – that should be targeted with inoculating drugs or health education in order to quickly isolate a contagion?

Information about social networks in rural villages in the developing world is costly and time-consuming to collect, and usually unavailable. So current immunisation strategies target people with established community roles: healthcare workers, teachers, and local officials.

Now, Cambridge researchers have for the first time combined networking theories with ‘real world’ data collected from thousands of rural Ugandan households, and shown that a simple algorithm may be significantly more effective at finding the highly connected ‘hubs’ to target for halting disease spread.

̽��ֱ��‘acquaintance algorithm’ employed by researchers is remarkably simple: select village households at random and ask who in their network is most trusted for medical advice.

Researchers were surprised to find that the most influential people in social networks were very often not those with obvious positions in a community. As such, these valuable ‘hubs’ are invisible to drug administration programmes without the algorithmic approach.

“Everyone is a node in a social network. Most nodes have just a few connections. However, a small number of nodes have the majority of connections. These are the hubs we want to uncover and target in order to intentionally cause failure in social networks spreading pathogens or damaging behaviour,” says lead researcher Dr Goylette Chami, from Cambridge’s Department of Pathology.

“It was striking to find that important village positions may be best left untargeted for interventions seeking to stop the spread of pathogens through a rural social network,” says Chami.

In the study, published today in the journal PNAS, the researchers write that this simple strategy could be particularly effective for isolating households that refuse to take medicine, so that they don’t endanger the rest of a community with infection.

To control disease caused by parasitic worm infections, for example, at least three quarters of any given community need to be treated. “ ̽��ֱ��refusal of treatment by a few people can result in the destabilisation of mass drug administration programmes that aim to treat 1.9 billion people worldwide,” says Chami.

An average of just 32% of households (‘nodes’) selected by the acquaintance algorithm need to be provided health education (and ‘removed’ from a network) to reach the disease control threshold for an entire community. Using traditional role-based targeting, the average needed is much larger: some 54%.

“We discovered that acquaintance algorithms outperformed the conventional field-based approaches of targeting well-established community roles for finding individuals with the most connections to sick people, as well as isolating the spread of misinformation,” says Chami

“Importantly, this simple strategy doesn’t require any information on who holds which role and how to reach them. No database is needed. As such, it is easy to deploy in rural, low-income settings.”

“In an ideal world, everyone would be treated,” says Chami. “However, with limited resources, time and information, finding the best connected neighbours, the ‘hubs’, and removing them through treatment, looks to be the quickest way to fragment a network that spreads infections, and to render the most people safe.”

Chami and colleagues from Cambridge and the Ugandan Ministry of Health collected data on social and health advice networks from over 16,000 people in 17 villages across rural Uganda. They also collected data on networks of disease using reports of diarrhoea as a proxy for infection spread – particularly relevant to recent large-scale cholera outbreaks.

To do this, Chami built a survey app from open source code and loaded it on to 76 Google nexus tablets. ̽��ֱ��team then trained a number of individuals from the local villages to help them go door to door.

Adds Chami: “This kind of ‘network theory’ approach to public health in the developing world, and the use of acquaintance algorithms, if tested in randomised controlled trials, may increase compliance to treatments and inform strategies for the distribution of vaccines.”

An innovative new study takes a network theory approach to targeted treatment in rural Africa, and finds that a simple algorithm may be more effective than current policies, as well as easier to deploy, when it comes to preventing disease spread – by finding those with “most connections to sick people”.

Finding the best connected neighbours, the ‘hubs’, and removing them through treatment, looks to be the quickest way to fragment a network that spreads infections

Goylette Chami

A fishing village along Lake Victoria in the Mayuge District of Uganda, close to where researchers gathered data for the latest study.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Baboons watch neighbours for clues about food, but can end up in queues

fpjl2 — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 09:01:05 +0000

Latest research on social networks in wild baboon troops has revealed how the animals get information from each other on the whereabouts of food. However, once information reaches a high status baboon, subordinates often end up in a queue for scraps.

A new study, by researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the Zoological Society of London, shows how baboons monitor each other for changes in behaviour that indicate food has been found, such as hunching over to scoop it up.

This ‘socially learned’ information gets transmitted through proximity: those with more neighbours are more likely to spot when someone starts feeding. Once they do, baboons will head towards the food.

Information then starts to spread through the troop, as more baboons observe feeding behaviour or notice their neighbours moving in the direction of food. However, troop hierarchy ultimately kicks in – with the most dominant member in the vicinity, usually a male, wading in to claim the spoils.

At this point, surrounding baboons will often form what can appear to be a queue, to determine who gets to explore that patch of ground next.

These queues reflect the complex interactions within a baboon troop. ̽��ֱ��sequence of baboons in a queue depends on status – sometimes through birth-right – as well as social and familial relationships to the particular baboon occupying the food patch.

̽��ֱ��new research, published in the open access journal eLife, breaks down the transmission of social information through a baboon troop into three stages:

Acquiring information: observing behaviour that suggests food.
Applying information: exploring the food patch (even if no food is left).
Finally, exploiting information: actually getting to eat.

̽��ֱ��researchers used social networking models to show how being close enough to spot behaviour change is the only driver for acquiring knowledge.

When it comes to applying and exploiting social knowledge, however, the characteristics of individual baboons – whether its sex, status, boldness, or social ties in grooming networks – determine who gets to eat, or where they are in any queue that forms.

Baboon troops can be sizable, sometimes as many as 100 members, with the troops in the latest study numbering around 70. On average, less than 25% of a troop – around 10 individuals – acquired information of a food patch, with less than 5% of the troop actually exploiting it.

“Who actually gets to eat is only half the story,” says Dr Alecia Carter, from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, who led the research.

“Just looking at the animals that capture the benefits of information, in this case food, doesn’t reflect the real pattern of how information transmits through groups. Many more animals acquire information, but are limited in their use of it for a variety of reasons.”

To conduct the study, researchers snuck handfuls of maize corn kernels, a high-energy baboon favourite (“like finding a stash of chocolate bars”) into the path of two foraging troops of wild chacma baboons in Tsaobis Nature Park, Namibia.

Once a troop member found the food, the researchers recorded the identities of baboons that spotted the animal eating, accessed the food patch, and got anything to eat.

Carter says that the best place for low-ranking baboons is often the peripheries, in the hopes of finding food and grabbing a few kernels before information spreads, and they are supplanted by the local dominant.

“ ̽��ֱ��more dominant a baboon is, the more spatially central in the troop they tend to be – as they can afford to be there. This provides more opportunities to gain information through the wider network,” says Carter.

Low-rankers that discover food will sometimes try to eat as stealthily or as quickly as they can, but, once a dominant has taken control of the food patch, a queue will often form. Grooming relationships to the feeding dominant can help a subordinate jump up a queue, although much of it is dictated by status.

For females, status is a birth-right that remains fixed throughout a baboon’s life. While human societies historically privilege the firstborn, in baboon troops maternal lineage is ranked by lastborn – with each new female baby replacing the last in terms of hierarchy.

Young males hold the same rank as their mother until they reach adolescence, usually around the age of six, and start asserting dominance through their bigger size, leading to shifts in status.

“It is relatively easy to collect dominance data, as baboons are constantly asserting dominance,” explains Carter. “Low-cost assertions of dominance, such as pushing an individual out of small patches of food, help to mitigate high-cost assertions, such as fights, and maintain the order.”

“However, baboons can mediate their status to a minor extent by having good grooming relationships, and low-ranking individuals have a slightly higher chance of applying and exploiting information if they are central in a grooming network. Over a lifetime of food opportunities, this may prove important for fitness.”

While baboons acquire information about food locations from watching others, they can also use social learning to see when that food is likely to be gone. Interestingly, the researchers found that males and females will often use this information in different ways.

“Baboons are highly vigilant, and constantly pay attention to what their neighbours are up to. When those in a food patch are sifting through dirt and clearly coming up empty-handed, most females will walk off, and won’t waste their time,” says Carter.

“Males on the other hand, particularly young males, are amazingly persistent, and will stay in a patch shifting sand around for a very long time in the hopes of finding a stray kernel.

“We hypothesise that, while males can afford to expend the energy, adult females are lactating or pregnant most of the time, so need to conserve their strength, and often end up using the information in a more practical way as a result.”

Baboons learn about food locations socially through monitoring the behaviour of those around them. While proximity to others is the key to acquiring information, research shows that accessing food depends on the complex hierarchies of a baboon troop, and those lower down the pecking order can end up queuing for leftovers.

̽��ֱ��more dominant a baboon is, the more spatially central in the troop they tend to be – as they can afford to be there

Alecia Carter

Baboon troop

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Yes

Cooperative communities emerge in transparent social networks

fpjl2 — Mon, 09 Mar 2015 19:05:45 +0000

People in a society are bound together by a set of connections – a social network. Cooperation between people in the network is essential for societies to prosper, and the question of what drives the emergence and sustainability of cooperation is a fundamental one.

What we know about other people in a network informs how much we are willing to cooperate with them. By conducting a series of online experiments, researchers explored how two key areas of network knowledge effect cooperation in decision-making: what we know about the reputation and social connections of those around us.

In most social contexts, knowledge about others’ reputation – what we know about their previous actions – is limited to those we have immediate connections with: friends, neighbours and so on.

But the new study shows that if the reputation of everyone in a network is completely transparent – made common knowledge and visible to all – rather than limited to the individuals who are directly connected, the level of cooperation across the overall network almost doubles. ̽��ֱ��network also becomes denser and more clustered (so your connections tend to be connected with each other).

̽��ֱ��researchers also tested how transparency of social connections in the group influences cooperation. On its own, common knowledge of social connections had little impact on overall levels of cooperation.

However, when the researchers combined transparency of social connections with transparency of everyone’s reputation, a community of the most cooperative formed. Members of the community actively removed links from less cooperative individuals and refused their proposals to reconnect.

Researchers found that belonging to the community of cooperators is profitable. Each interaction in the cooperative community is 23% more beneficial than the equivalent interaction in the less cooperative community.

̽��ֱ��study is published today in the journal PNAS, and was conducted by Cambridge and Oxford researchers.

“We show that knowing others’ past actions is the key driver of a high contribution level. Additionally, knowing who is connected to whom matters for the distribution of contributions: it allows contributors to form their own community,” said study author Dr Edoardo Gallo, from the Faculty of Economics and Queens’ College at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

“This finding suggests that in a world where social information is more available, people may increasingly insulate themselves in communities with other like-minded individuals. In the case we examined, belonging to the community of contributors is highly beneficial,” he said.

̽��ֱ��research sheds light on the problem of ‘public good’ provision: what motivates people to make costly actions towards a good that benefits everyone, even those who do not contribute to it. Perhaps the most defining example of ‘public good’ in the modern era is the preservation of our environment.

Gallo, along with Oxford colleague Chang Yan, devised an online experiment involving people forming connections and playing a ‘game’ of public good provision, also popularly known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

First, the participants in a group can freely form connections with each other which determine the network. After the network is formed, each individual decides whether to cooperate by contributing to a public good that only benefits their neighbours in the network.

Contributing benefits all the neighbours, but it is costly to the contributor. Not cooperating by not contributing, however, is costless.

̽��ֱ��best possible outcome for the group is for everyone to contribute. However, each individual has an incentive not to contribute: they can gain the benefits from others’ contributions without paying any cost themselves.

̽��ֱ��researchers recruited 364 people from crowdsourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk to play several rounds of a network formation game followed by a public good game. They investigated four treatments that varied the amount of knowledge subjects have about the network and previous actions of others.

When the reputation (previous actions) of everyone in the network was rendered transparent, the overall levels of cooperation were almost twice as high as when only the previous actions of immediate connections were known.

When the social connections for the entire network were also revealed to all, the cooperators formed their own community, leaving those with a history of being uncooperative out in the cold.

Gallo points out that whether the community formation – the insulating and ostracizing – that occurred in the transparent network is a desirable outcome depends on the nature of the behaviour that leads to the separation.

“In the experiment, the ‘good’ cooperators ostracize the ‘bad’ defectors, but one can argue the defectors brought it on themselves with their actions. If the same pattern occurred because of another more neutral behaviour, like an accent when speaking a language, then the ostracization might be undesirable for society,” Gallo said.

An online experiment reveals that the overall level of cooperation in a group almost doubles when the previous actions of all its members are rendered transparent. When all social connections within the group are also made transparent, the most cooperative band together to form their own community – ostracizing the less cooperative.

This finding suggests that in a world where social information is more available, people may increasingly insulate themselves in communities with other like-minded individuals

Edoardo Gallo

Marina del Castell

Cooperation

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Yes

Licence type:

Attribution

̽��ֱ��meaning of emoticons

ns480 — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:00:25 +0000

Alex Davies, a Gates scholar at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, has created a visual map of the words associated with Twitter emoticons. It's not just the usual smiley and sad face emoticons whose meaning is fairly obvious and associated with words such as birthday, weekend and Friday and hospital, cold, stomach and pain respectively.

Other emoticons include:

^_^ This is associated with more immediate pleasures such as food and holidays. Words linked to it include shopping, lunch, dinner and chocolate. It is more associated with Asian Tweeters, but has begun to be used more in the West.

<3 This emoticon, which looks like a heart on its side, is associated with words such as love, music, amazing, proud, beautiful, thankful, Jesus and Justin.

:/ This generally denotes a half-awake, slightly annoyed state, associated with words such as shift, sleeping, busy, class and Monday.

-_- This emoticon is indicative of frustration and is associated with words such as dumb, lame, dick and bitch.

Davies says all the emoticons he has analysed have been around for at least as long as the Internet has been in existence, but some are less prevalent than others. Some were used exclusively in Asia, but have now spread to the West, and being adopted by particular groups.

Davies, who is studying for a PhD in Engineering with a focus on statistical modelling, says: “ ̽��ֱ��creation of new emoticons has essentially stopped, but the context and usage of existing ones is constantly evolving. Take for example Asian style emoticons, such as ^_^ (happy) and -_- (sad).

“Initially these were used almost exclusively by Asian online communities, but have slowly been adopted by different Western sub-cultures and have taken on subtly different meanings in these contexts. One way to visualise this usage is to visualise the words that are strongly associated with these emoticons. What is interesting is that two emoticons that essentially represent the same sentiment, such as :) and ^_^, actually differ substantially in how they are used, and we can see this in the images of the words.”

Davies has also published a list of the happiness/sadness of 7,500 common words on Twitter after he was approached at an international conference about his previous work on creating a Twitter map of happiness. He was asked if he could release a list of words so people could easily create systems that use sentiment analysis of Twitter.

Davies says: “Twitter contains a wealth of sentiment information which researchers and businesses are very interested to explore so they can assess the changing global mood on different issues in real time and make predictions based on this.”

̽��ֱ��emoticons used on Twitter are a language in themselves and are taking on new and often surprising meanings of their own, according to new research.

Initially these were used almost exclusively by Asian online communities, but have slowly been adopted by different Western sub-cultures and have taken on subtly different meanings in these contexts.

Alex Davies

Candie_N from Flickr

smiley

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Yes

Tweeting disasters

ns480 — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 09:52:45 +0000

Professor John Preston, who is based at the ̽��ֱ�� of East London’s Cass School of Education, will tell the ‘Violent Nature’ Research Councils UK debate that Twitter and Facebook have been credited with being able to pick up advance signals of disasters. However, it is only in retrospect that the significance of the signals can be ascertained.

̽��ֱ��debate focuses on whether governments, scientists and aid agencies can manage the risks of living in potentially lethal locations. Other speakers include Professor James Jackson from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, Daniel Walden, policy adviser for disaster risk reduction at Save the Children UK and Dr Andrew Collins, reader and director of the Disaster and Development Centre at Northumbria ̽��ֱ��. It will be chaired by James Randerson, the Guardian's science and environment editor.

Professor Preston is the leader of a two-year cross-disciplinary research programme, supported by the the Research Councils UK Global Uncertainties Programme, which began in 2010 and seeks to uncover how the likes of Twitter and Facebook could save lives in the event of a national crisis such as a terrorist attack or natural disaster.

He says that where Twitter in particular works well is in correcting information and countering false rumours. “There is an inherent self-correcting bias in Twitter which is like the scientific process. When someone posts it sifts the evidence for and against and the more current information countervails anything that came before,” says Professor Preston, whose book Disaster Education is out early next year.

He adds: “Social networks can be used for malicious reasons to spread rumours by targeting false information at a few super-connected people. Information spread this way would take longer to correct.”

Professor Preston says: “Part of the reason authorities are put off using social media to spread information during disasters is that it can appear quite uncontrollable since information sharing after disasters tends to be followed by a period of emotional reflection on what it means. Emotion is very important in social media. It's not just about information. People use it quite creatively which can make it a little bit uncontrollable.”

̽��ֱ��research programme is looking at how to prepare the UK better for disasters, through, for instance, cell broadcasting and community education, and is looking at lessons that can be learnt from the past.

̽��ֱ��Violent Nature debate will take place at the McCrum Lecture Theatre, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge from 8-9.30pm on 25^th October.

Social networks like Twitter cannot help prevent disasters, but can quickly correct misinformation resulting from false rumours preventing possible further loss of lives, a leading researcher will tell a public debate on 25th October at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas.

Emotion is very important in social media. It's not just about information. People use it quite creatively which can make it a little bit uncontrollable.

Professor John Preston

DVIDSHUB from Flickr

Search and rescue

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Yes

Smartphone art

bjb42 — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 23:11:58 +0000

Despite its prevalence and increasing political influence, social media continues to polarise. Many people still find it baffling as to why so many others choose to regurgitate intimate details of their lives online for an army of strangers, and why those strangers are so keen to consume.

This desire to share personal content with global networks was the central premise that sociology student Zack McCune set out to explore, spending four months examining user behaviour in social media’s latest trends: networks that communicate in mobile photography.

Rather than the banal vanity often presumed by social media’s detractors to clog up these channels, McCune found that users encourage each other to pursue increasingly artistic visuals, experimenting with colour and composition, and often carefully crafting the content they post.

To begin with, McCune needed to select a network as a case study. So as not to be overwhelmed with a vast body of content, he settled on what was a new, mobile app-based network called instagram, which operates in a similar way to Twitter, with followers and trending topics, only using photos as the primary method of communication.

“ ̽��ֱ��static, visual aspect of photos was important in defining value as it binds the subject area,” explains McCune. “What inspired the capture of a moment and what was so personally rewarding in sharing it.”

This introduced the field of smartphone photography, or ‘iPhoneography’. ̽��ֱ��rapid increase in mobile camera sophistication is the latest stage in the shrinking space between seeing and sharing. “Since the Kodak Brownie, through to the Polaroid Instant and into the age of digital photography, technology has been closing the time between taking a photo and sharing it” says McCune. “Smart phone cameras and apps like instagram mean that you can offer a photo to global networks faster than typed text in many instances.”

“During recent events such as the London riots and Hurricane Irene, reports of damage and unrest were validated in part by mobile imagery, some of which appeared in traditional broadcast media.” Ironically in the case of the London riots, social media was blamed in some quarters for facilitating the trouble, which led to some MP’s calling for the power to shut down such networks at times of national crisis.

But people don’t just share imagery when newsworthy events take place in their vicinity. As with other social media networks, the vast amount of content on instagram documents daily activity and routine, normal folk doing normal stuff, but iPhoneography allows people to display their lives in visually arresting ways. This presents a creative challenge.

McCune says: “ ̽��ֱ��body of my research involved engaging directly with individual instagram users from across the platform, and I found that users are highly concerned with both personal production and social reception. Critically, they weren’t simply capturing but consciously crafting the imagery they shared.”

Deliberate artistry when creating content was a point of pride for many of the users. Instagram offers the ability to use a variety of filters that produce different effects, and the desire to create striking visuals through effects and interesting perspectives to impress the community was a key motivator. This led many to conclude that iPhoneography has encouraged them to look closer at their environment.

“All of the users I interviewed celebrated the creative aspects of iPhonography and the way it altered how they went about their day. Users enjoy thinking more imaginatively about the places they live and the people and events that surround them, seeing the world in new ways as they cultivate their own distinctive visual styles. It was amazing to discover that many instagram users felt the combination of a creative practice and a supportive community offered something therapeutic.”

Some users described the validation they got from the instagram community as empowering, overcoming social anxieties and even physical ailments such as deafness. One participant wrote that they use instagram “for my mental well-being, if I’m honest. It’s a form of escapism where I can truly indulge my creative side.” ̽��ֱ��responsive audience available through the network encourages people to share more, but also to engage more.

“In interviews, users routinely spoke of ‘community interaction’, leading them to go beyond simply posting and engage with the content of others in meaningful ways.” says McCune. “It is very much like a karma system. You must participate both as a producer and a consumer.”

As one user put it: “ ̽��ֱ��community itself is addictive. I am spurred on by other users comments and critiques, inspiring me to take more pictures to show the community: it feeds itself!”

McCune feels that current academic views on social media tend to be starkly divided between critics of its perceived conformity and amateur content on one hand, and proponents whose appreciation is often theoretical and lacks in-depth analysis on the other. He concedes that part of the reason for this is the technology moves at such a dramatic rate that it is constantly outpacing research.

“Sociology, I believe, is doing a great job of looking at the value of social media from first-hand, user-based research rather than imposing theory from above. My findings differ from many of the previous academic views by suggesting that social media can be very creative and communal rather than vapid and self-centred, as some critics have contended,” he says.

“Emerging digital networks are generated by users and it’s important we re-centre the focus on them and not the engineers and structures that define network actions. Social media is a culture of very real and very engaged people, we need to look and listen to the users.”

Zack McCune graduated from Cambridge with an MPhil in Sociology in 2011 and is now working for the mobile image-sharing platform Piictu based in New York City.

As mobile phone cameras improve, emerging forms of social media are basing themselves in ‘iPhoneography’. While social media is often held up as an example of the increasingly vacuous and self-obsessed nature of society, research into these new networks shows they can encourage creativity, and even provide users with a therapeutic outlet.

It was amazing to discover that many instagram users felt the combination of a creative practice and a supportive community offered something therapeutic.

Zack McCune

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Cambridge on Instagram

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Yes

Come here often?

sjr81 — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 09:30:58 +0000

To date, most social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn have relied upon the ‘friend-of-a-friend’ approach to try and determine which people may have connections with one another.

However, Salvatore Scellato, Anastasios Noulas and Cecilia Mascolo, of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, have devised a new approach that not only looks at friends of friends, but also the places people visit – with incremental weightings given to different places such as airports and gymnasiums.

Scellato said: “Essentially this is a way in which we can predict how people will make new friends. We know that we are likely to become friends with ‘friends of friends’, but what we find is there are specific places which foster the creation of new friendships and that they have specific characteristics.”

Historically, the problem facing social networks has been the sheer volume of users. While millions of users may represent good news from a business perspective, it means the task of recommending friends can become an exponentially difficult one, if, as in the case of Facebook, you have 750 million active users.

̽��ֱ��standard two-hop approach – sharing at least a common friend – has, to date, ignored the possibilities of recommending new friends based on the places where users ‘check-in’.

̽��ֱ��trio’s research is an extension of long-standing sociological theory that people who tend to frequent the same places may be similarly-minded individuals likely to form a connection with one another – but applied to social networking sites.

Added Scellato: “For our research we analysed the location-based social network Gowalla to see how users created social connections over a period of four months. We discovered that about 30 per cent of all new social links appear among users that check-in to the same places. Thus, these ‘place friends’ represent disconnected users becoming direct connections.

“By combining place friends with friends-of-friends, we can make the prediction space about 15 times smaller and yet, cover 66 per cent of new social ties.

“It turns out that the properties of the places we interact can determine how likely we are to develop social ties. Offices, gyms and schools are more likely to aid development rather than other places such as football stadiums or airports. In those places, it’s highly unlikely people will develop a social connection.

“Our results show it’s possible to improve the performance of link prediction systems on location-based services that can be employed to keep the users of social networks interested and engaged with that particular website.”

A new way of predicting which people may become friends on social networks - based on the type of places they visit - has been formulated by ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researchers.

It turns out that the properties of the places we interact can determine how likely we are to develop social ties.

Salvatore Scellato

MIDTN.com AKA Brent via Flickr Creative Commons

Ernest Tubb Record Shop sign

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Yes

̽��ֱ��business of social networking

lw355 — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 14:58:44 +0000

Social networking (SN) sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have taken communication in the 21st century by storm. As businesses increasingly embrace the technology to connect individuals and share information, a new study funded by Boeing is developing methods to measure its value to organisations.

‘SN technologies are seen by companies as a major opportunity for improving collaboration, managing knowledge, connecting with clients, and generally helping individuals to feel part of a business,’ says project leader Dr David Good in the Department of Social and Developmental Psychology. ‘But, there is little understanding of how SN technologies evolve, what impact they have in practice and therefore how one can best deploy them for business efficiency.’

In the past, SN structures were studied without much regard to the individuals that form them. However, Dr Good, PhD student Michal Kosinski, together with Dr Alan Blackwell from the Computer Laboratory and collaborators at Boeing believe that successful collaboration depends on the interaction of the SN structure and the individual characteristics of its members.

To investigate this problem requires the amassing of vast amounts of information on collaboration efficiency, SN structures and individual traits of network members, and then analysing the data using an interdisciplinary approach.

To understand individual traits, Michal Kosinski, working with David Stillwell from the ̽��ֱ�� of Nottingham, has developed a Facebook application that allows its users to complete a psychometric test and receive feedback. More than four million people have now taken the my Personality test, providing a huge dataset that links SN data with such traits as personality, life satisfaction, interests, education and demographic profile.

Results of the Facebook study will assist the team in evaluating the use of an in- house SN tool available to Boeing’s 160,000 employees and its relation to collaboration efficiency and tactical decision making.

SN services are predicted to replace email as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communication for 20% of business users by 2014. With such escalating use in mind, Boeing collaborator Dr Anthony Majoros comments on the widespread benefits of this new research: ‘For businesses to develop an effective culture around SN that places the technology at the centre of collaborative and communication activities, it’s important to develop the qualitative and quantitative measures that this project aims to do.’

For more information, please contact Dr David Good (dg25@cam.ac.uk) or Dr Alan Blackwell (afb21@cam.ac.uk).

A new study is examining the value of social networking technologies to business collaboration.

Social networking technologies are seen by companies as a major opportunity for improving collaboration, managing knowledge, connecting with clients, and generally helping individuals to feel part of a business.

Dr David Good

WebTreats ETC, on flickr

154 Blue Chrome Rain Social Media Icons

Boeing

Boeing is the world’s largest aerospace company and leading manufacturer of commercial aeroplanes and defence, space and security systems. ̽��ֱ��company strives to work with the best technical talent in developing new aerospace-related technologies and has established multi-year collaborative research relationships with several UK universities, including Cambridge.
With the future of aerospace being driven by developments in technology, Boeing is continually looking globally for new ideas and innovations. To help achieve this, the US-based company has established strategic relationships with universities around the world.

In the UK, Boeing is collaborating through multi-year agreements to conduct research and technology programmes with the ̽��ֱ�� of Sheffield, Cranfield ̽��ֱ�� and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. Not only are these programmes helping to expand Boeing’s technical reach and business concepts, but they also have long-lasting benefits in helping to stimulate British aerospace innovation.

Boeing’s framework agreement with Cambridge to conduct collaborative research began in 2003 and has recently been extended to 2014. Currently, nine projects are running, involving research teams in the Department of Engineering, the Computer Laboratory and the Department of Social and Developmental Psychology.

̽��ֱ��principal focus has been to conduct research and development in areas such as automated reasoning, intelligent systems, natural language and information processing, information manipulation and information security, new materials for high-end engineering, and the interface between humans and computers.

Professor Cardwell, from the Department of Engineering and the lead principal investigator in the collaboration, explains why the relationship with Boeing has proved such an extraordinarily healthy example of industrial collaboration with academia: ‘Boeing facilitate – they make it easy for us to do the academic research that we think is relevant, while keeping in mind the best interests of the company. It’s a very productive, very supportive way of doing research. Their open-minded attitude makes it possible for new objectives to be set as new discoveries are made.’

Applications of the research are as varied as developing new materials for energy-storage systems, assessing the potential of social networking technologies to improve knowledge management and communication in businesses (see above), and improving the operation and security of airports.

For more information about Boeing, please visit www.boeing.com/

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