PhD Dissertation Proposal by Felicia NATALI | Exploring Offline Friendships on Social Broadcasting Network: Network Characteristics, Information Diffusion, and Tie Strength

About The Talk

The boom of online social network services in the last decade offers an unprecedented opportunity to observe the rich behaviour of users on a societal scale yet down to individual granularity. The insight from these data could tremendously help us gain a deeper understanding of the users as well as the information flow, both of which are of great practical value for many business applications such as targeted marketing and branding. On the other hand, the connections among users, one of the most critical pieces of information in these tasks, are not homogeneous. Research have shown that people use social network services for both socialization and information sources, and hence the formation of different types of linkage among them. While there have been a great number of research work on the linkage among users in the online world, we argue that, to better understand the nature of the linkages, it is crucial to connect a user's online social network and offline social network. Questions such as "who is more important in modeling a user's interest?" and "what would speedup the diffusion of a piece of information?" can be better answered from the integrated offline-online perspective. My dissertation explores these issues in three essays. I especially focus on a social broadcasting network, i.e. Twitter. In the first essay I explore the network characteristics among offline friends vs. online friends on the online social network. In the second essay, I explore information diffusion among offline friends vs. online friends. In the last essay, I investigate how the tie strength among friends in the offline world maps to the tie strength among friends on the online social broadcasting network.

Speaker Biography

Felicia NATALI is a PhD Candidate in School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University. She is supervised by Assistant Professor Feida ZHU. Her primary research topic is Offline Friendships on Social Broadcasting Network. She works on social network with focus on network structures, relationships and information diffusion. Prior to starting PhD, Felicia completed his Bsc. in Information Systems from Singapore Management University. She also worked as an IT analyst at Singtel for a year.