November 22, 2005: Seminar: Jennifer Golbeck ''Web-based Social Network Analysis for Socially Intelligent Applications''

Abstract:
The immense popularity of social networks on the web make them an attractive data source. When these networks are represented in Semantic Web formats, distributed social network information can be integrated into a single large model that can be analyzed. In this talk, I will present research on computational methods for understanding relationships in web-based social networks- particularly trust relationships. I will then describe projects where the results of these analyses are used to create socially intelligent applications. The most prominent of these is the FilmTrust system, a web-based social network that uses trust in social networks to create predictive movie recommendations. In this context, I show that the social computations outperform more traditional collaborative filtering techniques in certain cases. These results are used as a motivation for future work that can take advantage of the massive, publicly available resource offered by social nets.

Jennifer Golbeck is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and the Joint Institute for Knowledge Discovery at the University of Maryland, College Park. She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2005 and her Bachelor's and Master's degrees at the University of Chicago. Her research interest is web intelligence, with an emphasis on the integration of semantic web technologies and human computer interaction.

Host: Professor Isabel Cruz