Welcome to Social Network Analysis.

My name is Lada Adamic I'm an associate

professor at the University of Michigan.
I'm affiliated with the School of
Information, The Center for the Study of
Complex Systems and the Computer Science
Department.
What I'd like to show you in this course
is what we can get out of modeling the
world around us as networks.
Now the world is very complex and once you
represent it as a network,
It may not really look any less complex,
But indeed, we can gain very useful
insights.
We can start to understand how information
diffuses in social networks.
We can also understand how resilient
different infrastructure networks, such as
roads, or the electrical power grid are,
to random or intentional builders.
Here's one example I'd like to start with.
These are hand drawn networks made by the
artist Mark Lombardi.
He constructed them by pouring over news
articles in the 1980's and 1990's,
Making connections between political
entities and different financial
institutions and corporations.
When you leave them out, you could see
connections that might not otherwise be
obvious just by reading the news articles
one by one.
Here's Michael Kimmelman a columnist for
the New York Times commenting on having
encounters a few folks from the Department
of Homeland Security at an exhibit of Mark
Lombardi's art.
They found the work revelatory,
Not because the financial and political
connections he mapped were new to them,
But because Lombardi showed them an
elegant way to array this spread
information, and make sense of things,
Which they thought might be useful to
their security efforts.
Now, in this class I'm not going to make
you do hand-drawn network layouts, even
though there really hard to beat, but Mark
Lombardi would spend days drawing these
over and over until they were perfect.
Instead, what we are going to be doing is
using automated layout algorithms, in
software such as Gephi.
Now, here is a nice example of how
automated layout algorithms make things
very apparent.
All they're doing is placing nodes that
are connected through edges close together
and, other nodes are repelled.
Actually, all nodes experience a
reflection force so that they're not all
clumped together unless the ties bring
them together.
This is a data set of political blogs
prior to the 2004 presidential election
and this is who follows who,
Who, who has whom on their blog roll.
The Liberals are colored in blue, the
Liberal blogs.
The Conservatives are colored red.
Liberal to Liberal ties are blue,
Conservative to Conservative are red.
Liberal to Conservative are purple,
Conservative to Liberal, orangish yellow.
And what is apparent right away is that to
some extent, there's an echo chamber
effect,
Where Liberals are primarily talking to
Liberals and Conservatives are primarily
talking to Conservatives,
And all I really had to do was run one
layer algorithm.
I did not have, in this case, although we
did do this in our study,
To even do any calculations for this
pattern to be to be apparent.
Now here is another example of the data
set I have gathered, This is an
organization of Hewlett-Packard labs, so a
bunch of researchers,
And what we looked at were, was there
e-mail communication.
If two people had exchanged at least a
couple of emails back and forth over the
period of a few months they get a gray
etch.
I've overlaid here black edges, which
represent the formal organization, who
reports to whom.
Now, what is immediately apparent from
this visualization, and what we confirmed
in the study,
Is that the email communication is more
likely to occur between individuals who
are closer together in the organizational
hierarchy.
But there are enough shortcuts across the
organization that any two individuals are
connected through a short number of hops.
But the fact that those hops roughly
follow the organizational hierarchy makes
the e-mail network navigable.
So informal collaboration getting the job
done, it's reflected in this network.
This network is my Facebook network and
what I've done here is I've used an
automated community detection algorithm,
in addition to an automated layout
algorithm [laugh] to layout my Facebook
friends.
And what the automated community detection
algorithm did was it said, oh, there seem
to be some people in your network who are,
tied together and" more so, they're
connected more than they are to the rest
of your network.
And indeed, once you're working with this
data, within an automized version of this
data, you'll see that the different groups
roughly corresponds to different context
in, which I've met people from school to
work, to outside of school and work
activities.
And this you can just tell without, you
know, without really knowing anything
about my life, you can look at my network
and, and understand quite a bit of it.
The final network is one of ingredients,
recipe ingredients.
We analyzed tens of thousands of recipes
to figure out which ingredients go well
together and then we made a network.
In fact, we made several networks and in
this one you can see that there are two
main communities. One of savorier
ingredients, and one of sweeter
ingredients.
And actually, at the very top, there's a
smaller community, and you'll, you'll play
with this data in time.
That is the mixed drink community, where
you have ingredients such as vodka and,
and lime juice.
So, what I've shown you so far is that,
you know, even just visualization can buy
you a lot in understanding what the myriad
of connections that we know are there,
Can, can represent,
But that might be rather invisible to us
untill we represent them as this network
where they're all connected together and
this is where we're going to get the nice
insight.
I am going to be using maybe somewhat
inconsistent terminology, so I may
alternate between the words network and
graph.
Graph is the terminology where, you know,
it all started in the field of mathematic,
but I'm more likely to use the word
network for example the new emerging field
now is network science and it doesn't make
a network any less of a graph, it's just
that you can use both terms.
Similarly, I'm going to primarily use the
words nodes." and esges,
However, nodes can also be referred to as
vertices. if you're talking, bbout
sociological phenomenon.
Are you talking to a sociologist?
They might use the word, actor.
Similarly, for ties, a sociologist might
say, ties, [laugh] or relations.
A physicist might talk about sites and
bonds, although physicists who work on
networks do say, nodes and edges.
And finally, in computer science, you
might be talking about links, especially
if you're talking about networks, such as
the World Wide Web.
So we have a variety of terminology, it's,
it's very easy to, get used to it, and all
we're talking about in the end is that you
have different entities and the
connections between those entities, and
that is what we're going to analyze.
Let me get to the goals in this course.
In addition to making pretty pictures we
need to really understand what the
structure of a network is.
So we're going to do some measurement and
in this measurement, we're going to look
at whether nodes are connected through the
network.
We're going to look at how far apart they
are in the network.
How many hops does it take following these
different connections?
We're going to look at whether some nodes
are more important than others due to
their position in the network.
And we're going to look at whether there
are these communities in the network, that
is, sets of nodes that are especially
densely connected.
We are not going to be satisfied just
knowing that there's this structure.
We want to know where does this structure
come from?
What kinds of processes shape a network?
So we're going to start with randomly
generated networks, where you're just
throwing edges at random and connecting
different minutes.
Then we're going to look at preferential
attachment where it's a phenomenon of rich
get richer.
As new edges are added, they're more
likely to be added to the nodes that are
already popular, in a sense.
They already have many other edges.
We're going to be looking at small world
networks as well so you might have
processes, such as a friend of a friend is
likely to be a friend because friends tend
to introduce their friends to each other.
And yet any two people in the world are
connected through a short number of hops.
So recently a Facebook study showed that
any two people in the Facebook graph are
connected with an average of 4.7 hops.
We're going to see how certain processes
might shape such small-world structure,
for example, how do small worlds arise out
of optimization, for example, airline
networks might be optimized to ferry
passengers back and forth in a way that is
efficient and doesn't cost the airlines
much money.
You might also have strategic network
formation at the level of the individual,
so the individual is getting something out
of participating in the network.
And so they may choose to connect to some
nodes and not others.
Okay.
So,
We're going, we've described the network
structure.
We figured out where that network
structure comes from.
And the final goal is to understand how
that network structure now influences
different processes occurring on the
networking [inaudible].
So for example, we're going to learn how
information diffusion is affected by the
network structure.
If any two people are, are connected
through a short number of pops does this
mean that information will readily
diffuse.
Sometimes it's not information that's
diffusing but something that we don't want
to diffuse such as a virus.
So, how does the social network actually
influence how quickly a virus is going to
spread, and what immunization strategies
can you use once you know what the
structure of the network is?
We may study the process, or we are going
to study processes such as opinion
formation.
This can be, kind of a consensus, that can
be reached across the network as
individuals continuously update their
beliefs or it may be just a single shot,
You, you, you form your opinion only once,
But it is influenced by what your friends
think.
We're also going to be looking at
coordination and cooperation.
If you have a certain task that you'd like
to do, but it,
But it depends on increments from the
nodes that you're tied to, how quickly can
you accomplish the task?
And finally, we're going to look at
resilience to attack, so if for some
reason, a certain, subset of the nodes,
are removed from the network, can the
network still function?
Now, I filled in the first six weeks, so
you might be wondering what we're going to
be doing in weeks seven and eight.
In week seven, we're going to look at cool
and unusual applications of social network
analysis.
We're going to be looking at things such
as recipe ingredient networks for
predicting recipe ratings.
We're going to be looking at the social
networks of dolphins and, we're also going
to look at, economic development.
So if you have the network of countries
and the products that they produce, can
you actually make predictions about which
products the countries are going to
produce in the future and how rapidly
those countries are going to develop
economically.
In the final week, we're going to look at
how a social network analysis is used by
companies such as Google, Facebook,
Linkedin, Twitter, CouchSurfing, to
enhance their product offerings.
So what kind of social network analysis do
they do?
What kinds of research have they done?
And, how has this impacted and, benefited,
the,
The features of the social networks that
they enable?
So those are that's the outline of the
course.
In the next video I'm going to dive right
into it and we are going to visualize
some,
Some networks and see what it's all about.