Rejaie Awarded NSF Grant to Study Structural Properties of Online Social Networks
Professor Reza Rejaie has received a grant for $350,000 from the National Science Foundation to characterize the structure of Online Social Networks (OSNs) and investigate the underlying social causes that determines the structure. Funded by the NSF Division of Information & Intelligent Systems, the project is a joint effort of the UO CIS and Sociology Departments, the Mathematics Department at Duke University and AT&T Labs Research.
Over the last few years, OSNs such as MySpace and Facebook have attracted hundreds of millions of users and have been responsible for a new wave of popular applications over the Internet.
In this multi-disciplinary research project, Prof. Rejaie and CIS Ph.D. students Mojtaba Torkjazi and Masoud Valafar design, develop and rigorously evaluate theoretically grounded techniques to accurately measure and properly characterize the connectivity structure of large-scale and dynamic networked systems. More specifically, the project examines various graph sampling techniques for collecting representative samples from large and evolving graphs. It also investigates how multiscale analysis can be used as a powerful technique to characterize the key features of the connectivity structure of large dynamic networked systems at different scales in space and time. The developed techniques will be used to characterize fundamental properties of the friendship and various interaction connectivity structures in different OSNs. This project investigates the underlying technical and social factors that primarily drive the structural properties and dynamic nature of OSN-specific connectivity structures.
This project will produce new models for friendship and interactions in OSNs, a large archive of anonymized datasets and new tools for OSN measurement, simulation and analysis. The latter will be incorporated into newly-developed courses in Computer Science and Sociology, and will be freely distributed.
For more information, see the project web page at http://mirage.cs.uoregon.edu/OSN/.