TITLE: How to search in a small world
SPEAKER: Lada Adamic [HP Labs]
DATE: 2:00 - 3:00 P.M., Thursday October 9, 2003
LOCATION: Sigma, 1 L (PA)
HOST: Vinay Deolalikar
ABSTRACT:
We address the question of how participants in a small world experiment are
able to find short paths in a social network using only local information about
their immediate contacts. We simulate such experiments on a network of actual
email contacts within an organization as well as on a social network of students
recorded on a community website (Club Nexus). On the e-mail network we find that
small world search strategies using a contact's position in physical space or in
an organizational hierarchy relative to the target can effectively be used to
locate most targets. However, we find that in the Club Nexus network, where the
data is incomplete and hierarchical structures are not well defined, local
search strategies are less effective. We compare our findings to recent
theoretical hypothesis about underlying social structure that would enable these
simple search strategies to succeed and discuss the implications to social
software design.
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