IC Colloquium : Social communities and mobile phone communication networks
Event details
| Date | 06.12.2012 |
| Hour | 16:30 › 17:30 |
| Speaker | Vincent Blondel, University of Louvain (Belgium) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Abstract
We describe several recent results on large network analysis with a special emphasis on community detection and on the analysis of mobile phone datasets. In particular, we describe two simple and efficient methods - the "Louvain method" and the recent Partition-Merge method - for the detection of communities. Partition-Merge is a general and versatile method that allows to turn any existing centralized algorithm for graph computation distributed while keeping accuracy guarantees. The Louvain method - now used byLinkedIn for its visualization application InMaps - has sub-quadratic computational complexity and can be routinely used for analyzing networks with billions of nodes or links. We analyze communities obtained on a nationwide dataset of criminal records, as well as on a social network constructed from mobile phone communications in Belgium and in France on periods covering several months. In the later we observe a gravitational law of social interaction as well as spatially distributed social structures that have potential political implication.
We finally describe applications of mobile phone dataset analysis for a range of applications such as urban planning, traffic optimization, monitoring of development policy, crisis management, and control of epidemics. With these applications in mind we overview the ongoing "Data for Development" (D4D) challenge (http://www.d4d.orange.com/) organized jointly with Orange on the analysis of mobile phone datasets from an African country and for development purposes. So far the D4D challenge has attracted projects by more than 200 research groups.
Biography
Vincent D. Blondel is professor of applied mathematics at the University of Louvain (Belgium) were he has been department head for close to a decade. He is also affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, USA) where he was a visiting professor and Fulbright scholar in 2004-2005 and again in 2010-2011. In 2012-2013 he is the Kokotovic Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California (Santa Barbara). Vincent has also held various positions with the University of Oxford, the Australian National University and the Santa Fe Institute. He has directed more than thirty PhD and Master thesis and is the recipient of several international prizes for research done in mathematical control theory, theoretical computer science and network science. Vincent is the coordinator a national research network between 200+ researchers in systems, optimization and control in Belgium, Princeton and Stanford and he is the Belgian coordinator of the mammoth one billion dollars EU research Flagship proposal FuturICT. His work has been widely featured, including in Wired, Technology Review, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and The New York Times.
We describe several recent results on large network analysis with a special emphasis on community detection and on the analysis of mobile phone datasets. In particular, we describe two simple and efficient methods - the "Louvain method" and the recent Partition-Merge method - for the detection of communities. Partition-Merge is a general and versatile method that allows to turn any existing centralized algorithm for graph computation distributed while keeping accuracy guarantees. The Louvain method - now used byLinkedIn for its visualization application InMaps - has sub-quadratic computational complexity and can be routinely used for analyzing networks with billions of nodes or links. We analyze communities obtained on a nationwide dataset of criminal records, as well as on a social network constructed from mobile phone communications in Belgium and in France on periods covering several months. In the later we observe a gravitational law of social interaction as well as spatially distributed social structures that have potential political implication.
We finally describe applications of mobile phone dataset analysis for a range of applications such as urban planning, traffic optimization, monitoring of development policy, crisis management, and control of epidemics. With these applications in mind we overview the ongoing "Data for Development" (D4D) challenge (http://www.d4d.orange.com/) organized jointly with Orange on the analysis of mobile phone datasets from an African country and for development purposes. So far the D4D challenge has attracted projects by more than 200 research groups.
Biography
Vincent D. Blondel is professor of applied mathematics at the University of Louvain (Belgium) were he has been department head for close to a decade. He is also affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, USA) where he was a visiting professor and Fulbright scholar in 2004-2005 and again in 2010-2011. In 2012-2013 he is the Kokotovic Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California (Santa Barbara). Vincent has also held various positions with the University of Oxford, the Australian National University and the Santa Fe Institute. He has directed more than thirty PhD and Master thesis and is the recipient of several international prizes for research done in mathematical control theory, theoretical computer science and network science. Vincent is the coordinator a national research network between 200+ researchers in systems, optimization and control in Belgium, Princeton and Stanford and he is the Belgian coordinator of the mammoth one billion dollars EU research Flagship proposal FuturICT. His work has been widely featured, including in Wired, Technology Review, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and The New York Times.
Links
Practical information
- Informed public
- Free
- This event is internal
Organizer
- Host : Prof. Patrick Thiran
Contact
- Christine Moscioni / S. Muller