HCIL Seminar: "Status, Power & Incentives in Social Media" by Dr. Jon Kleinberg, Cornell

Wed Oct 10, 2012 3:15 PM

By Jon Kleinberg, Cornell

Reception: 3:15pm, 2015 Hornbake Building, South Wing, University of Maryland-College Park
Lecture: 4:00pm, 0109 Hornbake Building, South Wing, University of Maryland-College Park

Abstract:
Many of the social phenomena that take place on-line can be usefully interpreted in terms of status, power, and the mechanisms by which people evaluate and form opinions about each other. In this talk, we discuss a set of approaches for measuring status, ranging from metrics based on contributions to subtle signals in the language people use when they interact with one another. In addition, we also consider ways in which the allocation of status can provide incentives that shape the collective work of a community; surprisingly, we find that in theoretical models of effort by credit-seeking individuals, certain unfair assignments of status produce incentives that can lead to increased productivity.

The talk includes joint work with Ashton Anderson, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Dan Huttenlocher, Lillian Lee, Jure Leskovec, Sigal Oren, and Bo Pang.

Biography:
Jon Kleinberg is the Tisch University Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Information Science at Cornell University. His research focuses on issues at the interface of networks and information, with an emphasis on the social and information networks that underpin the Web and other on-line media. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of MacArthur, Packard, and Sloan Foundation Fellowships, as well as awards including the Nevanlinna Prize from the International Mathematical Union and the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences.