May 19, 2009

Duncan Watts keynote speech at ICWSM


(1) evolution of social network structure over time

- Work with Gueorgi Kossinets

- Social network changes over time. Averages about network structure (e.g., path length, clustering coefficient, node degree) stay rather steady over time, but individual quantities (e.g., rank) change rapidly.

- What does this mean in terms of social applications?



(2) macro-sociological experiment on social influence

- Music lab experiment -- very cute idea.

- People do get influenced by others. However, the top favorites in the social influence world also did well in the independent world. (Same trend for the bottom ones in the popularity distribution. Lots of noise in medium hot content)



(3) network survey on facebook

- Launched "Friend Sense" app on Facebook and asked political preferences of users and their friends.



(4) influence of financial rewards on performance

- Crowd sourcing site Amazon's Mechanical Turk (AMT) is a fantastic place to launch quick and inexpensive social science studies.

- Increased pay resulted in more work, but not increased accuracy in work. People always feel they are underpaid---the anchoring effect in psychology



(5) final remarks

- We moved from having too little data to having too much data.

- Facebook's 200+M users don't fit on a single memory for us to analyze!

- Having one more zero in your dataset (huge-data) doesn't mean that you're asking big questions. It's more important to ask important questions and set up experiment that can answer the question.

- Lada Adamic's recent work on diffusion of gesture on second life

- Duncan said, "You might ask why are we even asking this obvious question. After many years of being a sociologist, nothing is obvious!"


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