Man is many things, but he is not rational.
- Oscar Wilde
Social influence analysis in online social networks is the study of people’s influence by analyzing the social interactions between individuals. Since the last decade, there have been numerous research efforts to understand the influence propagation phenomenon due to its importance to viral marketing and information dissemination among others. Despite the progress achieved by state-of-the-art social influence analysis techniques, a key limitation of majority of these techniques is that they transform the problem to a cold hard network algorithm problem by stripping off fundamental factors of human psychology and behaviors. For example, these efforts ignore human psychology such as conformity of people, which refers to a person’s inclination to be influenced. Consequently, despite the great progress made in terms of algorithmic efficiency and scalability, existing techniques may not necessarily produce high quality results in practice. In this research, we investigate the interplay between psychology and social influence in online social networks and devise novel social influence-based solutions that are psychology-aware. In particular, our research aims to bridge two disparate fields, social psychology with online social analytics, and address some interesting problems at their intersection.
Our research results have appeared in premium venues such as ACM SIGMOD and VLDB Journal.
This research is partially funded by ROAR and RSS grants from NTU.
