Thesis Webpage

Advisor: Prof. Javed I. Khan
Department of Computer Science
Kent State University
Date Submitted: July 2007

Communities are the latest phenomenon on the internet. At the heart of any community lies a social network. Various websites are providing tools for social interactions within these communities. These websites are referred to as social networking platforms (SNP). These websites now enable researchers access to an individual’s relationship structure which can be used to support many complex computations that we call social network based computations.. In our work, we have outlined a framework to represent and reason with the basic case of social relationship network and to facilitate the structural analyses that can be performed on SNP. The relationship algebra, which is based on set theoretic concepts, is a stepping stone to define primary relationship between various social nodes. It can be further refined to establish complex relationships. The algebra consists of mainly two components, the relationship reasoning system (RRS) and the relationship quantification system (RQS). The RQS is used to quantify the strength of the relationships, whereas the RRS is used to define the various relationships that exist in a social network and to derive and infer relationships, which are not obvious but exist. This framework can be used as a starting point to carry out various forms of primary structural analysis on the social network’s knowledge base. Our other contribution is the proposal of a classification of social network computations based on the underlying algorithmic structures. The computations have been classified as Social Profile Mining, Social Fabric Analysis, Social Linkage Analysis, Social Ranking Analysis and Placement within a Community. We have supported our claim by providing algorithmic structures and computational solutions for each class of application.

Thesis Title:

COMPUTATION POSSIBILITIES IN SOCIAL NETWORKS