UAI 2004 Invited Talks
Cascading Behavior and Bursty Dynamics in Computational Models of Social Networks
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Jon Kleinberg Department of Computer Science Cornell University Home Page: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/
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Probabilistic models
for the processes by which ideas and influence propagate through a social
network have been studied in a number of domains, including the diffusion of
scientific and technological innovations, the sudden and widespread adoption of
various strategies in game-theoretic settings, and the effects of ``word of
mouth'' in the promotion of new products. Emerging on-line media such as Weblogs
offer a compelling new setting in which to study such phenomena, since they are
characterized by frequent ``topic bursts'' in which a virtual discussion spreads
rapidly through the network of individuals who author on-line content.
A natural way to identify highly influential individuals in such network
settings is to look for collections of nodes with the power to trigger large
outbreaks of cascading behavior. In other words, if we can try to convince a
subset of individuals to adopt a new behavior (e.g. to try a new product or take
part in an on-line discussion), and the goal is to cause a large cascade of
further adoptions, which set of individuals should we target?
In this talk, we will consider such problems in several of the most widely
studied models in social network analysis, and describe algorithms (obtained in
joint work with David Kempe and Eva Tardos) with provable approximation
guarantees for the problem of selecting the most influential set of nodes. The
development of these algorithms indicates how influential sets must include
members from diverse parts of the network, forcing heuristics for this problem
to deal, at least implicitly, with the clustering of the underlying population.
We conclude by discussing the intriguing relationship between models of
influence propagation and the problem of identifying ``bursty'' topics, which is
emerging as an important issue for searching on-line information resources.
What is the matter? Explorations in text categorization
Lillian Lee Department of Computer Science Cornell University Home Page: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/llee/
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Human language is rife with
ambiguity, both intentional and unwitting, which means that systems for
analyzing human-authored documents must reason under uncertainty as a matter of
course. Even the presumably easier problem of text categorization, construed
broadly to refer to the grouping of documents that are somehow similar in
content, remains a challenge. Nonetheless, this talk will discuss work on two
text-categorization problems in which new algorithms lacking access to prior
linguistic knowledge perform surprisingly well.
We first present Iterative Residual Rescaling, a subspace-projection method that
generalizes and empirically outperforms Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) in
representing inter-document topic-based similarity measurements. The new
algorithm is motivated by analysis employing matrix perturbation theory that
reveals a precise relationship between LSI's performance and the uniformity of
the document set's underlying topic distribution.
We then address a different problem that has attracted a great deal of attention
recently: that of sentiment classification, an example of which is determining
whether a movie review is "thumbs up" or "thumbs down". We demonstrate that new
techniques based on finding minimum cuts in graphs yield state-of-the-art
results.
Joint work with Rie Kubota Ando and with Bo Pang.
Good-Turing estimation and its applications
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Alon Orlitsky Departments of ECE and CSE University of California at San Diego Home Page: |
While deciphering the Enigma Code during World War II, I.J. Good and A.M.
Turing derived a surprising and unintuitive formula for estimating a probability
distribution from a sample of data. The eponymous Good-Turing Estimator has
since been used in a variety of applications and studied by a number of
researchers. We define a simple measure for the performance of an estimator and
use it to show that the Good-Turing estimator is good but not optimal and to
derive an asymptotically optimal estimator. We outline three applications of
such estimators.
Joint work with N.P. Santhanam, K. Viswanathan and J. Zhang.
Markov Processes and Markov Decision Processes: The Verification Perspective
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Moshe Y. Vardi Department of Computer Science Rice University Home Page: |
In property-based verification one uses algorithmic
techniques to establish the correctness of the design with respect to a given
property. The verification technique of model checking is based on a small
number of key algorithmic ideas, tying together graph theory, automata theory,
and logic. In the past 20 years, model checking has been applied successfully to
the analysis of protocols and circuits, increasingly becoming a standard
industrial practice. In this talk I will describe how model checking can be
adapted to Markov Processes and Markov Decision Processes, offering a
property-based approach to the analysis of these models.