With the success of online social networks and microblogging platforms  such as Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, the phenomenon of  influence-driven propagations, has recently attracted the interest of  computer scientists, sociologists,  information technologists, and marketing specialists. In this talk we will take a data mining perspective, discussing what (and how) can be learned from a social network and a database of traces of past propagations over the social network.

Starting from one of the key problems in this area, i.e. the identification of influential users, we will provide a brief overview of our recent contributions in this area. We will expose the connection between the phenomenon of information propagation and the existence of communities in social network, and we will go deeper in this new research topic arising at the overlap of information propagation analysis and community detection.

BIO

Francesco Bonchi is Director of Research at Yahoo Labs in Barcelona, Spain, where he is leading the Web Mining Research group. His recent research interests include mining query-logs, social networks, and social media, as well as the privacy issues related to mining these kinds of sensible data. In the past he has been interested in data mining query languages, constrained pattern mining, mining spatiotemporal and mobility data, and privacy preserving data mining. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pisa in December 2003.

He is member of the ECML PKDD Steering Committee, Associate Editor of the newly created IEEE Transactions on Big Data (TBD), of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), the ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS), and member of the Editorial Board of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (DMKD). He has been program co-chair of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD 2010).