Making Sense of Social Networks
Speaker: Adam Perer, IBM Research
Date: Friday, March 18 2011
Time: 1:00PM to 2:00PM
Refreshments: 12:45PM
Location: Patil/Kiva Seminar Room, 32-G449
Host: Rob Miller, MIT CSAIL
Contact: Juho Kim, juhokim@mit.edu
Relevant URL: Abstract:
The increasing amount of digital information in society has ushered in a golden age for data analysis. Ample data encourages users to conduct more frequent exploratory data analyses to explain scientific, social, cultural and economic phenomena. However, access to data is important but ultimately insufficient without understanding patterns, identifying outliers, or discovering gaps. Modern databases are simply too large to examine without computational tools that allow users to process and interact with the data.
A growing trend in data analysis is sensemaking of linked data as networks. My research focuses on understanding these (social) networks because they are topical, emerging and an inherently challenging process for analysts. Networks are difficult to visualize, navigate, and most problematic, it is difficult to find task-relevant patterns. Despite all of these challenges, the network perspective remains appealing to sociologists, intelligence analysts, biologists, communication theorists, bibliometricians, food-web ecologists, and many other professionals. These analysts believe that the ways in which elements are connected are just as important as the elements themselves.
My talk will describe three major aspects of visual analytics: designing new techniques to communicate and interact with network data more effectively, designing new methods to understand and aid analysts, and designing new applications to mine and visualize the complex relationships of social media. In particular, I will describe SocialAction, a visual analytical tool I built that has been instrumental for scientific discoveries, including medical research at the National Library of Medicine, counter-terrorism research at the Department of Homeland Security’s START center, and political analysis at US News & World Report.
Bio:
Adam Perer is a research scientist in the Visual Communication Lab at IBM Research in Cambridge, where he visualizes, mines, and analyzes digital traces of social media. He previously was a member of the Social Technologies Group at IBM Research Haifa in Israel. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2008, where his advisor was Dr. Ben Shneiderman and he was a member of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab.
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