סמינר מחלקתי
Information Spread in the 21st Century
Alon Sela – PhD student
Abstract
The following work presents a theoretical framework to describe the dynamics of information spread in the 21st century, followed by applicable methods.
The work starts by comparing the spread of messages by ‘word-of-mouth’ (WOM) vs. the spread through websites and search engines (WEB). It relays on observations that search engines grade webpages by PageRank-related algorithms, an approach that seems to be biased towards spreading messages that are globally popular vs. less popular ones. At the other hand, ‘word-of-mouth’ spread is less biased by global popularity trends, since each member is mainly exposed to its local social circle. As a consequence of these claims, it is reasonable to assume that i) the initial spread of new and less popular messages through WOM schemes are faster than such spread by WEB schemes; and ii) that the contents’ diversity of messages is lower when solely relying on WEB spreading schemes.
Simulations of the two spreading models as well as empirical studies with human subjects support these two claims, and reveal that messages’ spreading by WOM is faster and enables a higher contents’ diversity.
Following these results, the work continues and presents two applicable tools: i) the "Scheduling Seeding" algorithm; a novel approach to message spread which is improve the spread by approximately 25%, and (ii) a method that successfully predicted hot trends, with 21/23 correct predictions, by searching "Viral Footprints" in time series of terms searched in Google.
This work was performed under the supervision of Irad Ben-Gal.
ההרצאה תתקיים ביום שלישי 26.5.15, בשעה 14:00, בחדר 206, בנין וולפסון הנדסה, הפקולטה להנדסה, אוניברסיטת תל-אביב.
