Ajita John

This article investigates the impact of user homophily on the social process of information diffusion in online social media. Over several decades, social scientists have been interested in the idea that similarity breeds connection: precisely known as "homophily". Homophily has been extensively studied in the social sciences and refers to the idea that users in a social system tend to bond more with ones who are similar to them than to ones who are dissimilar. The key observation is that homophily structures the ego-networks of individuals and impacts their communication behavior. It is therefore likely to effect the mechanisms in which information propagates among them. To this effect, we investigate the interplay between homophily along diverse user attributes and the information diffusion process on social media. In our approach, we first extract diffusion characteristics---corresponding to the baseline social graph as well as graphs filtered on different user attribut...

Context-aware communications applications rely on detailed knowledge of people’s contexts to facilitate specific types of communication. An important element of a person’s context is his or her current presence status. Since Web browsers are universally deployed across user computers and devices, and have turned into the client software of choice for many user activities, from information retrieval to downloading multimedia content, they can make excellent collection endpoints for user presence information. In this paper, we present our client-side browser-based architecture Argus that gathers detailed user presence information through a Web browser, communicates the data to context-aware communications applications, and allows such applications to act on the collected presence information by quickly conveying information to users through their browser software. We show how our client-side architecture, in conjunction with context-aware communications applications, can accelerate an...

Collaborative tagging offers an interesting framework for studying online activity as users, topics (tags), and resources (bookmarks) get associated with each other through a folksonomy. In this paper, we consider an activity-based perspective of collaborative tagging where activity is defined as the act of associating a tag with a bookmark by a user. The perspective categorizes activities based on two defined measures: intensity and spread, which indicate the level and range, respectively, of the tagging activity, measured for both users and tags. Our block-model perspective juxtaposes two sub-perspectives: (i) A user perspective that captures the activity of users across different tags and, (ii) A tag perspective that captures the activity in tags across different users. This juxtaposition can provide an insight into different communities of users and tags. It has applications in identifying trends and types of interests in web communities as well as expertise, staffing needs and ...

Social media channels such as Twitter have emerged as platforms for crowds to respond to public and televised events such as speeches and debates. However, the very large volume of responses presents challenges for attempts to extract sense from them. In this work, we present an analytical method based on joint statistical modeling of topical influences from the events and associated Twitter feeds. The model enables the auto-segmentation of the events and the characterization of tweets into two categories: (1) episodic tweets that respond specifically to the content in the segments of the events, and (2) steady tweets that respond generally about the events. By applying our method to two large sets of tweets in response to President Obama’s speech on the Middle East in May 2011 and a Republican Primary debate in September 2011, we present what these tweets were about. We also reveal the nature and magnitude of the influences of the event on the tweets over its timeline. In a user st...

Abstract. Enterprises are increasingly deploying social computing platforms, such as blogs, shared bookmarks, and social networks, to support the interpersonal interactions and knowledge work practices of their employees. These technologies hold great promise for supporting distributed collaboration by enabling greater communication and fostering awareness among colleagues. Promotion of awareness and communication, however, faces an inherent tension with desires for privacy. Additionally, differences in privacy expectations and practices between parties who interact through these systems could lead to misunderstandings and miscommunication. This paper reports on a study of geographically distributed knowledge workers collaborating on a software development project in a multinational corporation. Contrary to expectations, we found that knowledge workers in India expressed higher privacy concerns compared with their colleagues in the US. We are currently analyzing the data from field ...

Abstract. To understand how collaborators reconcile the often conflicting needs of awareness and privacy, we studied a large software development project in a multinational corporation involving individuals at sites in the U.S. and India. We present a theoretical framework describing privacy management practices and their determinants that emerged from field visits, interviews, and questionnaire responses. The framework identifies five relevant situational characteristics: issue(s) under consideration, physical place(s) involved in interaction(s), temporal aspects, affordances and limitations presented by technology, and nature of relationships among parties. Each actor, in turn, interprets the situation based on several simultaneous influences: self, team, work site, organization, and cultural environment. This interpretation guides privacy management action(s). Past actions form a feedback loop refining and/or reinforcing the interpretive influences. The framework suggests that ef...

This thesis presents a simple method for the concurrent manipulation of linearly ordered data structures on hypercubes. The method is based on the existence of a pruned binomial search tree rooted at any arbitrary node of the binary hypercube. The tree spans any arbitrary sequence of n consecutive nodes containing the root, using a fan-out of at most [log₂ 𝑛] and a depth of [log₂ 𝑛] +1. Search trees spanning non-overlapping processor lists are formed using only local information, and can be used concurrently without contention problems. Thus, they can be used for performing broadcast and merge operations simultaneously on sets with non-uniform sizes. Extensions to generalized and faulty hypercubes and applications to image processing algorithms and for m-way search are discussed.

A method and apparatus for enabling a user of a telecommunications terminal to specify desired characteristics for the recipient of a call in lieu of a contact identifier are disclosed. The illustrative embodiment enables a user to specify one or more of the following criteria for a recipient:(i) a role requirement that specifies a role (eg, a nurse, a doctor, etc.);(ii) a capability requirement that specifies one or more capabilities (eg, able to speak Spanish, etc.);(iii) a location requirement (eg, on the third floor of Building A, etc.); and (iv) a ...

Methods and apparatus are provided for developing and processing workflows that include communication tasks. A workflow is generated according to the present invention by inserting at least one communication node in the workflow. The communication node associated is with a communication task having at least one property that is resolved at run time. For example, the media type, recipient list, or timing of a communication may be resolved at run-time. A workflow generation tool is provided that generates a workflow ...

Pinterest is a Social Network Site (SNS) centered around the curation and sharing of visual content. The site encourages users to form ties with (follow) other users based on mutual interests, and use these ties to discover and share content. In this work, we examine the efficacy and relevance of the Pinterest follow mechanism in driving content discovery and curation. We collect a sample of user activity and find that the vast majority (88%) of the unique users who interact with an average user's content are non-followers. Conversely, only 12.3% of a user's followers interact with any of their pins. Users who discover and repost content from outside their follow network also do not subsequently follow the contributors of that content. Our results strongly suggest that following is neither heavily utilized nor strongly effective for driving content discovery and sharing on Pinterest.

Abstract The paper presents a simple and effective method for the concurrent manipulation of linearly ordered data structures on hypercube systems. The method Is based on the existence of an augmented binomial search tree, called the pruned binomial tree, rooted ...

Abstract. Current SNMP-based management frameworks make it dif-ficult for a network administrator to dynamically choose the variables comprising the MIB at managed elements. This is because most SNMP implementations represent the MIB implicitly as part of the agent code - an ...

In this paper, we analyze communication in online communities to extract the representative 'key' groups and provide a novel framework to establish the utility of such groups. Corporations may want to identify representative groups (which are indicative of the overall community) because it is easier to track 'key' groups rather than overall community. This can be useful for advertising, identifying "hot" spots of resource consumption as well as in mining representative moods or temperature of a community. Our framework has three parts - extraction , characterization and utility of 'key' groups. First, we extract groups in an online community by developing features representing communication dynamics of the individuals. Second, to characterize the overall community, we identify a subset of groups within the community as key groups. Third, we justify the utility of these 'key' groups by using them as predictors of related external phenomena; specifically, stock market movement of technology companies and political polls of elections. We have conducted extensive experiments on two popular blogs, Engadget and Huffington Post. We observe that the 'key' groups can predict stock market movement / political polls satisfactorily with mean error rate of 20.32%. Further our method outperforms baseline methods based on prediction using all groups, prediction based on communication co-participation of individuals and prediction based on individuals alone with respect to two metrics - 'predictivity' and 'resilience'. This implies that communication dynamics of individuals are essential in extracting groups in a community, and the 'key' groups extracted by our method are meaningful in characterizing the overall communities.

We have developed a computational framework to characterize social network dynamics in the blogosphere at individual, group and community levels. The framework is important in addressing problems related to targeted advertizing and understanding network resource usage patterns. Secondly, we also show how to determine the utility of the mined knowledge, by correlating it with an external time series (the stock market). Our framework is comprised of three steps. First, we model features at an individual level along different dimensions as activity characteristics, communication influence, spatial graph properties. These features are used to extract groups and their evolution. Second, we model features at a group level using assortativity, characteristic path length and aggregate individual characteristics at the group-level. These group features are used to extract group-types (unsupervised clusters). Third, we characterize communities using several activity based and temporal measures: temporal density (to capture consistency), conductance, coverage (to capture cohesiveness), group-type entropy and size entropy. To test our model, we have analyzed postings on the consumer electronics web magazine, Engadget ( www.engadget.com ) related to four topics (Apple, Nokia, Microsoft and Google). Our results show that the community macro characteristics are indicators of different event types (positive / negative). We establish the utility of the extracted groups, by showing that they predict the stock market movement well (89%) and removal of important groups reduces predictability by 26% on the average.

A method and apparatus for selecting one of a plurality of delivery mechanisms for sending a message are disclosed. The illustrative embodiment enables the advantageous selection of the delivery mechanism for sending a message from a first telecommunications terminal to a second telecommunications terminal based on at least one of:(i) the location of the first terminal,(ii) the location of the second terminal,(iii) the time and date (ie, the calendrical time) at the first terminal,(iv) the calendrical time at the second terminal, and (v) one or more ...

Methods and apparatus are provided for controlling an availability of a user in an enterprise environment. If an enterprise user requests to change an availability status on one or more media, a determination is made as to whether to grant the request based on one or more predefined criteria associated with the enterprise. For example, the predefined criteria may comprise resource needs or one or more policies of the enterprise. The predefined criteria may be expressed as one or more rules in a rule base.

An apparatus and methods are disclosed that enable a caller to specify a condition of availability for a return call when the caller is unable to reach the called user. A condition might indicate a time interval in which the caller is willing to accept a return call, a location, or some other constraints. In the illustrative embodiments, when a caller places a call and is unable to reach the called user, the caller is prompted via an interactive voice response (IVR) system for one or more conditions of availability for a return call. As soon as the ...

Abstract: An apparatus and methods are disclosed that enable a caller to specify a condition of availability for a return call when the caller is unable to reach the called user. A condition might indicate a time interval in which the caller is willing to accept a return call, a location, or some other constraints. In the illustrative embodiments, when a caller places a call and is unable to reach the called user, the caller is prompted via an interactive voice response (IVR) system for one or more conditions of availability for a return call. As soon as the ...

A method is disclosed that enables the selection of a team of people in an organization, such as a business enterprise, to participate in a task that involves communicating with each other, in which the selection of the team seeks to maximize the team cohesiveness. The illustrative embodiment of the present invention incorporates the use of a social network model to describe the communication pattern in the organization. Based on the relationship between the organization's social network structure and the cohesiveness between the ...

A method and apparatus for selecting one of a plurality of delivery mechanisms for sending a message are disclosed. The illustrative embodiment enables the advantageous selection of the delivery mechanism for sending a message from a first telecommunications terminal to a second telecommunications terminal based on at least one of:(i) the location of the first terminal,(ii) the location of the second terminal,(iii) the time and date (ie, the calendrical time) at the first terminal,(iv) the calendrical time at the second terminal, and (v) one or more ...

CHARACTERISED IN THAT: the user input specifies a role requirement and a location requirement that is independent of the location of said telecommunications terminal; AND BY:(b) determining, in response to said user input, which of a plurality of users to call based on: i) said role requirement, ii) said location requirement, iii) the current locations of said users, and iv) roles associated with said users.

Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and non-transitory computer-readable storage media for creating tag subscriptions and notifying users based on tag subscriptions. A system configured to create tag subscriptions receives from a user, as part of a tag subscription request, a tag, a selection of at least one media event to which the tag is to be applied, and a notification threshold. The system then establishes a tag subscription associated with the user based on the tag, the selection of at least one media event, and ...

Disclosed are systems, methods, and non-transitory computer-readable storage media for presenting temporal aspects of a group of tags associated with a primary media stream. The temporal aspects of the tags are presented by obtaining temporal metadata for the tags, generating a secondary media stream for the media event based on the temporal metadata, and delivering the secondary media stream to a user terminal, such that the secondary media stream is navigable at the user terminal. The secondary media stream includes a ...

Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and non-transitory computer-readable storage media for aggregating and presenting tags. A system configured to practice the method identifies a type for each tag describing a media event received from a tagging system, generates aggregate tags representing at least a portion of the set of tags based on the identified types, associates each aggregate tag with the media event based on the at least the portion of the plurality of tags represented by each respective aggregate tag, and ...

Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and non-transitory computer-readable storage media for classifying a live media tag into a type. A system configured to practice the method receives a group of tags generated in real time and associated with at least a portion of a live media event, identifies a tag type for at least one tag in the group of tags, and classifies the at least one tag as the tag type. Tag types can include system-defined types, user-entered types, categories, media categories, and text labels. More than one user can ...

Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and non-transitory computer-readable storage media for managing resources. A system for managing resources is configured for categorizing users according to at least one of common user characteristics and common user behaviors with respect to at least a first domain to yield a group of users. The system is also configured for identifying at least one user behavior during a first time interval for at least one user in the group of users and associated with an event in a second domain ...

Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and non-transitory computer-readable storage media for managing user interfaces. A system for managing user interfaces is configured for categorizing users according to at least one of common user characteristics and common user behaviors with respect to at least a first domain to yield a group of users. The system is also configured for identifying at least one user behavior with respect to a second domain during a first time interval for at least one user in the group of users. The system is further ...

Methods and apparatus are disclosed for providing a virtual assistant to at least one party of a communication. The virtual assistant is injected into the communication, for example, by a VXML engine. The operation of the virtual assistant is controlled by one or more software modules that are obtained from a proxy node. The software modules allow commands received from or destined for the party to be interpreted. The virtual assistant may optionally be customized based on a selection of the one or more supported external applications. ...

Methods and apparatus are disclosed for collecting presence information about a user from one or more presence sources associated with the user, such as applications, devices and locations. A presence agent is associated with each presence source; and the presence agents provide presence information to one or more presence servers. Typically, the presence agents execute on a processor associated with the corresponding presence source. The presence agent reports one or more of macropresence events and ...

Methods and apparatus are provided for analyzing user activity and for recording such user activity in an entity relationship model. A network is searched for materials associated with a user and content analysis techniques are performed on the associated materials to extract one or more characteristics from the associated materials based on predefined criteria. The extracted information is stored in an entity relationship model that relates the user to the extracted characteristics. The characteristics may include activity information, expertise ...

Abstract: Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and non-transitory computer-readable storage media for processing media highlights. A first method includes displaying a real-time media event to a user, and, upon receiving a first indication from the user at a first time, generating a highlight of the real-time media event based on the first time, the highlight being associated with a portion of the real-time media event at the first time, and associating, in a highlight database, the highlight with an individual profile of the user. The highlight ...

Abstract: Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and non-transitory computer-readable storage media for simplifying and clarifying user interfaces, both their design and usage. The disclosed system creates and applies rules user options. Upon application of the rules, the system automatically organizes the user options in accordance with the rules, such that the programmer no longer needs to organize every aspect of an options menu and a user can quickly and efficiently choose from the options. Statistics regarding usage and probability ...

Abstract: A method of determining which users are experts and which tags are appropriate without some of the disadvantages of the prior art is described. The level of a user's expertise is determined based on previous tags, the categorization of one or more tags, and the rating of the tags previously left by the user. The appropriateness of a tag is based on previous tagging of information by the user, by the number of times a user has tagged information with the same categorization, and the rating of a user.

Techniques are disclosed for determining, for each candidate communication medium, the availability of one or more telecommunications endpoint users for participating in a communication session of interest (ie, either new or existing) via the evaluated medium. In accordance with the illustrative embodiment of the present invention, an availability manager determines the availability based on (i) one or more discrete rules, or (ii) one or more continuous functions, or both. The continuous functions are specified with respect to ...

Techniques are disclosed for determining, for each candidate communication medium, the availability of one or more telecommunications endpoint users for participating in a communication session of interest (ie, either new or existing) via the evaluated medium. In accordance with the illustrative embodiment of the present invention, an availability manager determines the availability based on (i) one or more discrete rules, or (ii) one or more continuous functions, or both. The continuous functions are specified with respect to ...