Three-Toed Sloth

Behold the Masses (Next Week at the CMU Statistics Seminar)

Attention conservation notice: Publicity for a talk at CMU next week. Of limited interest if you're not free and in Pittsburgh at 4 pm on Monday the 14th.

We are very happy to have Nathan Eagle, of the Media Lab and SFI, as our seminar speaker next week, talking about the extremely cool work he's been doing on some extremely large social networks.

"Inference in Complex Social Systems: Insights and Applications from the Behavior of the Aggregate"

Monday, 14 April 2008, 4 pm, Porter Hall 125C at Carnegie Mellon

Abstract: I have used mobile phones to continuously gather information including proximity, location, and communication from 100 human subjects at MIT. Systematic measurements from these people over the course of nine months has generated one of the largest dataset of continuous human behavior ever collected, representing over 300,000 hours of daily activity. Additionally, in collaboration with several European and African telecommunication companies, I am currently analyzing the call logs of entire countries - dynamic social networks consisting of up to 250 million nodes and 12 billion temporal edges.

In this talk I describe how this type of data can be used to uncover the structure in behavior of both individuals and organizations, infer relationships, and study social network dynamics. By combining theoretical models with rich and systematic measurements, we show it is possible to gain insight into the underlying behavior of complex social systems.

While results such as uncovering scaling laws from the communication patterns of hundreds of millions of people will certainly be one emphasis in this talk, of equal importance is how this data can enable applications that improve our society. I will demonstrate a variety ways these insights into our own behaviors can be used to develop applications that better support both the individual, organization and society.

The talk is of course free and open to the public; come if it sounds interesting (unless you're like some people who attend talks in Santa Fe [not that Nathan's work is remotely comparable to Sheldrake's]).

Networks; Enigmas of Chance; Complexity; Commit a Social Science