Stochastic Models of User-Contributory Web Sites Interested in modeling how to people view and rate existing content.  The talk is an extended example using Digg. Votes on stories is a combination of visibility (do they see the story) and interest (do they like it, vote on it).  In this experiement, they don’t have info on…

System Design and Community Culture The role of rules and algorithms in shaping human behavior Panelists: Lukas Biewald, Dolores Labs Rashimi Sinha, Slideshare Cameron Marlow, Facebook Dolores Labs – Making Crowds Efficient and Reliable.  They pay people to perform tasks, aka Amazon Mechanical Turk. Slideshare – Focus on social design.  Presentations are fundamentally social –…

A Categorical Model for Discovering Latent Structure in Social Annotations This paper describes a model to the structure of semantic topics over documents using tags. They propose a community-based categorical annotation model.  Communities form around interests, expertise, language, etc.  Each community has a number of categories as its world view.  Therefore the community draws tags…

Duncan Watts knows about Social Networks.  Looks at the web as a tool for doing social science research.  Observing individual behavior, and interactions recorded in real time, for large populations.  Can the web lead to a social science revolution? This talk will describe four studies, each motivated by a substansive science question, and illustrate use…