Computer Science Colloquium: Dr. Augustin Chaintreau

Dr. Augustin Chaintreau of Columbia University will speak on "Filter & Follow: Measuring and Explaining the Efficiency of Social Media."

April 30, 2014
4:15 pm - 5:30 pm
Location
006 Steele
Sponsored by
Computer Science Department
Audience
Public
More information
Shannon Stearne

"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." If Robert Solow's famous remark came in 1987, how would the Nobel-prize economist judge our social media era that started twenty years later? Is the nascent computing field of social media analysis even able to answer that question? In this talk we address how social media may augment not only the volume but the relevance of the information we receive, in the spirit of illustrating the hard challenges that answering this question poses. The talk will survey recent approaches and then present two examples of results: (1) The manifestation and validation of the "filtering law" which is the first indirect evidence of efficiency that can be established from publicly available data. (2) A proof that this law is compatible with a social information diffusion model of incentive, which also predicts that stable networks of followers are efficient.

Augustin Chaintreau is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. His research, by experience in industry, is centered on real world impact and emerging computing trends, while his training, in mathematics and theoretical computer science, is focused on guiding principles. He designed and proved the first reliable, scalable and network-fair multicast architecture while working at IBM during his Ph.D. He conducted the first measurement experience of human mobility as a communication transport tool while working for Intel and, as member of the Technical Staff of Technicolor (formerly, Thomson), showed that opportunistic caching in mobile networks can optimally take advantage of social properties. His recent work is motivated by the need to reconcile privacy with progress for our mobile social applications, through a better understanding of the value of social data and how they are used.

An ex-student of the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, he earned a Ph.D in mathematics and computer science in 2006. He has been an active member of the networking research community, serving in the program committees of ACM SIGCOMM, CoNEXT,  SIGMETRICS, MobiCom, MobiHoc, IMC, WSDM, WWW, COSN, and IEEE Infocom. He is also an area editor for IEEE TMC, ACM SIGCOMM CCR, and ACM SIGMOBILE MC2R.

Location
006 Steele
Sponsored by
Computer Science Department
Audience
Public
More information
Shannon Stearne