1 / 24

Web as a Laboratory for Understanding Humanity

Jure Leskovec Stanford University. Web as a Laboratory for Understanding Humanity. Web – The Lab for Humanity. The Web is my “laboratory” for understanding the pulse of humanity. Large on-line applications with hundreds of millions of users. Digital Traces  Networks.

ponce
Download Presentation

Web as a Laboratory for Understanding Humanity

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Jure Leskovec Stanford University Web as a Laboratory for Understanding Humanity

  2. Web – The Lab for Humanity The Web is my “laboratory” for understanding the pulse of humanity. Large on-line applications with hundreds of millions of users

  3. Digital Traces  Networks Model as an interactionnetwork

  4. Analyzing Online Media • Collect 40 million articles, posts / day • Study media ecosystem at large

  5. 2008 U.S. presidential election campaign

  6. How is News Made? Blogs trail mass media for 2.5h on average (but professional blogs lead!)

  7. Influence of Media Types Newspapers Pro Blogs TV News Agencies Blogs Entertainment

  8. Media Networks Blogs Mainstream media

  9. Media Networks: Zoom-in Blogs Mainstream media

  10. Modeling Human Behavior • Predicting new links on Facebook • Out of 20k we select 20 and get 8 right!

  11. Friend or Foe? – – + – ? + + – + + – – • > 90% accuracy

  12. But, where are we going? • Observations: Big data • Actively influencing the system • Models: Predictions • Algorithms: Applications

  13. Changing the Behavior How to change human behaviors.. • Observations: Data analysis • Actively influencing the system • Models: Predictions • Algorithms: Applications … to evolve into a “happy” network?

  14. THANK YOU

  15. Example: Utility of links Predicting links on We get ~50% of them right But, what is global utility? • Observations: Data analysis • Actively influencing the system • Models: Predictions vs. • Algorithms: Applications How to evolve into a “happy” network? Too sparse Too “cluttered”

  16. Reflections • Why are networks organized the way they are? • Build models/understanding • Make predictions • Large data • Observe/model patterns not visible at smaller scales

  17. http://snap.stanford.edu THANK YOU “The future is already here — it just is unevenly distributed” William Gibson

  18. Physchohistory • Three axioms of Physchohistory: • Detailed data about the population • Population should be sufficiently large • The population should remain in ignorance of the results Can we do it today?

  19. What’s next? • combines history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make (nearly) exact predictions of the collective actions of very large groups of people, such as the Galactic Empire. • What’s next? • psychohistorians, masters of an esoteric mathematical science that enables them to plan for the future of their galactic civilization and realize their plans by making minimal changes in the society around them

  20. Seriously • Psychohistory depends on the idea that, while one cannot foresee the actions of a particular individual, the laws of statistics as applied to large groups of people could predict the general flow of future events.  • Asimov used the analogy of a gas: an observer has great difficulty in predicting the motion of a single molecule in a gas, but can predict the mass action of the gas to a high level of accuracy • If we’d want to predict future we would need: • The population whose behavior is modeled should be sufficiently large • The population should remain in ignorance of the results

More Related