User Modeling in Large Social Networks

This proposal aims to harness the power of data, social, and network sciences to model user behavior in social networks. Specifically, we focus on individual users and investigate the interplay between their behavior and subsequently emergent social phenomena. Work in this proposal unveils the significant social strategies that are used by people to satisfy their social needs. We apply computational methods to address user modeling problems, including demographic inference, link recommendation, and social impact prediction. The proposed research work can be translated into applications in large social systems, such as mobile communication, online social media, and academic collaboration.