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Cambridge Networks Network

 

Dr Sune Lehmann from DTU Informatics, Technical University of Denmark

Title: Measuring Social Networks

Abstract: Over the past decade, we have made tremendous progress in understanding the complex networks in the world around us. In terms of social systems, we have recently developed the technological ability to measure such networks with unprecedented accuracy, using modern smartphones as sensors. Until now, however, no research group has taken full advantage of this technology to develop a dataset that would allow us to make a true leap in the quantitative understanding of social systems. For the past year, my group has worked towards creating a dataset of unparalleled quality and size. We use top-of-the-line smartphones as measurement devices to capture the complete network (face-to-face, telecommunication, online social networks, etc). Our goal is to measure these networks for an entire freshman class at my university (about 1200 individuals) in 2013. In terms of size, this will increase the number of study participants by a full order of magnitude compared to similar studies in the field. This year, we launched the beta-test with approximately 200 participants. The talk will discuss prior work in this area, and our considerations related to establishing an experiment of this scale. I will also share some early results generated over the past couple of months.

 

 

Date: 
Tuesday, 6 November, 2012 - 17:00 to 18:00
Event location: 
Keynes Hall, King's College