Harnessing Network Science to Reveal Our Digital Footprints

Network science is an interdisciplinary endeavor, with methods and applications drawn from across the natural, social, and information sciences. In addition to theoretical developments, electronic databases currently provide detailed records of human communication and interaction patterns, offering novel avenues to map and explore the structure of social networks.

In this WICI event, Jukka-Petta Onnela spoke about the structure of a social network based on the cell phone communication patterns of millions of individuals, and what implications it has for diffusion processes on social networks. She also spoke about social influence processes by analyzing the collective behavior induced by 100 million "app" installations on a popular social networking website. Finally, she discussed the algorithmic detection of tightly connected groups of nodes in networks, a prominent problem in network science known as community detection. After introducing the theoretical framework, she demonstrated how the introduced multi-slice method can be used to detect community structure in a general setting encompassing networks that evolve over time, have multiple types of links, and exhibit structure at multiple scales.

More information about this WICI Events can be found here.

Speaker Profile: Jukka-Petta Onnela

Jukka-Petta Onnela is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Medical School at Harvard University, where his supervisor is Prof. Nicholas Christakis. He is interested in a broad range of theoretical and applied problems in network science. His current research focuses on the statistical and mathematical analysis and modeling of social networks; metrics and methods for network analysis; network theory; and online social systems and social media.