Social Dynamics in Conferences: Analyses of Data from the Live Social Semantics Application

  • Alain Barrat
  • Ciro Cattuto
  • Martin Szomszor
  • Wouter Van den Broeck
  • Harith Alani
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 6497)

Abstract

Popularity and spread of online social networking in recent years has given a great momentum to the study of dynamics and patterns of social interactions. However, these studies have often been confined to the online world, neglecting its interdependencies with the offline world. This is mainly due to the lack of real data that spans across this divide. The Live Social Semantics application is a novel platform that dissolves this divide, by collecting and integrating data about people from (a) their online social networks and tagging activities from popular social networking sites, (b) their publications and co-authorship networks from semantic repositories, and (c) their real-world face-to-face contacts with other attendees collected via a network of wearable active sensors. This paper investigates the data collected by this application during its deployment at three major conferences, where it was used by more than 400 people. Our analyses show the robustness of the patterns of contacts at various conferences, and the influence of various personal properties (e.g. seniority, conference attendance) on social networking patterns.

Keywords

Online Social Network Contact Event Conference Attendee Online Social Networking Site Social Networking System 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010

Authors and Affiliations

  • Alain Barrat
    • 1
    • 2
  • Ciro Cattuto
    • 2
  • Martin Szomszor
    • 3
  • Wouter Van den Broeck
    • 2
  • Harith Alani
    • 4
  1. 1.Centre de Physique Théorique (CNRS UMR 6207)MarseilleFrance
  2. 2.Complex Networks and Systems GroupInstitute for Scientific Interchange (ISI) FoundationTurinItaly
  3. 3.City eHealth Research CentreCity UniversityUK
  4. 4.Knowledge Media instituteOpen UniversityUK

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