Please join us for Web Science Tea on February 29th, at 1p in TSRB 113. Associate Professor Milena Mihail will lead a discussion on "Models for Social Networks."

Dr. Mihail's slides are available here (PowerPoint, 3.6 MB).

Preamble: In our search for "what is Web Science", it is becoming more and more evident that a large part of Web Science will sit at the intersection of computer science, economics,and the social sciences. The discussion outlined below falls in this spirit.

Abstract: Communities, including online communities, function (form, organize, exchange/propagate information and other utilities, expand, dissolve) through interactions. A natural way to model such interactions is a graph or a network (though graphs and networks are by far not the only ways to model community interactions). What kind of networks are appropriate to model communities and their functions? I want argue that it all depends on which question you are trying to answer. I will lead a discussion on various models for social networks, and the corresponding questions that they are trying to answer.