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Information and Control in Social Networks - Another one of MIT’s 150th Birthday Celebratory Symposiums/Workshops (May 30-June 1 2011 http://mit150.mit.edu/events/information-and-decision-workshop )

I am somewhat late in reporting this due to other commitments.

The importance of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube is beyond question. Nations rise and fall, careers launched and destroyed directly depend on the existence of such networks as many recent world events demonstrated (which also partially explains as to why these sites are blocked in China). Thus, it was timely that MIT ‘s Laboratory for Decision and Control sponsored such a workshop.

The workshop consisted of four plenary talks and a set of sessions with the titles:

·       Communities and Structure

·       Information Propagation

·       Influence and Control

·       Opinion, Learning, and Games

·       Online Networks

·       Data Collection and computational Social Science

Here are some of my general observations and learning:

1.   Network science although being primarily a applied mathematical subject does possess a great deal of real data. Thus experimentations are possible.

2.   Actually social network existed long before Facebook, YouTube and Twitter – the telephone connections each of us have with our friends and contacts. However, security and privacy concerns prevented us from studying it. But now it is possible to render these data anonymous due to advances in digital technology. Thus, here is another large source of data

3.   Most of the papers in the workshop dealt with model building for networks attempting to describe the observe behavior. Despite the word “control” in the title of the workshop, we are not quite ready to attempt serious effort of control over it. When and if you do, the social implication can be tremendous

4.   Two of the plenary talks deal with genetic component of social networks and cascading phenomenon in networks.

5.   The detail program of the workshop is available at http://wids.lids.mit.edu/wids_program_final.pdf

6.   This discipline is still young. Plenty of opportunities seem to exist.