Introductory slides for a panel discussion at the Social Graph Symposium, May 21, 2010

1. Social Graph Symposium Panel Ho John Lee | Principal Program Manager | Bing Social Search

2. About me: Ho John Lee hojohn.lee@microsoft.com twitter.com/hjl Past: Bing Twitter (v1), SocialQuant, trading, investing/consulting (China, India) HP Labs, MIT, Stanford, Harvard Current: Bing Social Search - graph and time series analysis, data mining Twitter, Facebook, new products, technical planning

3. What can we do by observing social networks? On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog. But in social networks, we can tell if you act like a dog, what groups you belong to, and some of your interests

4. How many Twitter users are there? from a search on twopular, May 2009

5. Graph analysis for relevance and ranking Spam marketing campaign (teeth whitening) Naturally connected community (#smx) Real time relevance needs data mining to filter and rank based on history Spammy communities can be highly visible Social graph, topic/concept graph, and behavior/gesture graphs are all useful tools

6. Information diffusion in the graph Observed incidence network of retweets in Twitter Kwak, Lee, et al, What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media? WWW2010 Information flow and behaviors form an implicit interaction graph

7. Topic / sentiment range, volume, trend analysis What is the baseline rate of mentions / sentiment per unit time? Look for changes in attention flow around a subject, location, topic Watch for correlated signals from multiple sources Consider source relevance and authority as well

8. Applying graph analysis Attention flow vs information flow Leads to utility functions, cost functions Variable diffusion rates by actor / network / info type Predicting interests and affiliations Content creation follows attention Self-organized communities of attention If there’s no content, you can ask for some Observable propagation of information

10. But can potentially be used to identify likely individual users!

12. Thank You Ho John Lee hojohn.lee@microsoft.com twitter.com/hjl

13. Thank you