4:06 pm April 17th, 2008 by wkallander

Today we focused on the three main thrust areas available for our projects. Ther three main areas were:

1. Social Network Analysis
2. Network Formation and Community Development
3. Building an Application (on top of an Online Social Network)

I am leaning more twards the latter two, mainly because I am interested in link prediction (which has some similarity with respect to community/network formation). I’m also curious about the OpenSocial and Facebook APIs, so that might be fun too. I’m thinking though, that I need to do something more theory oriented in preparation for a thesis topic.

One aspect about doing a project about communities, is that evaluating communities that have been formed through a synthetic process is not easy. There are several metrics that can be applied, but it is not clear that they are universal in scope - some real networks may exhibit certain “signatures” that defy explanation because the underlying model is not well understood.

At any rate, the discussion section did help to narrow the field of possibilities, which was useful.

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