Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

Social networking systems (SNSs) such as Facebook and Twitter have attracted millions of users by providing social network based services to support easy message posting, information sharing and inter-friend communication. With the rapid growth of social networks, users of SNSs may easily get overwhelmed by the excessive volume of information feeds and felt challenging to digest and find truly valuable information. In this talk, a personalized feed recommendation service for SNS users based on user interests and social network contexts is introduced. The proposed approach incorporates both the topical preference and topological locality of a user in determining a feed's relevance. A popularity diffusion model has been proposed to propagate feeds in social networks in order to support the personalized  feed recommendation service. Personalized indices for feed-based information retrieval and a suite of efficient index manipulation algorithms have been developed to address the
need of managing the dynamics in social networks. An extensive performance evaluation has been conducted to compare our proposal with alternative solutions using both real and synthetic social network data. The result suggests that our proposal is superior in both efficiency and relevance.


 

Wang-Chien Lee is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Pennsylvania State University, where he leads the Pervasive Data Access (PDA) Research Group to pursue cross-area research in database systems, pervasive/mobile computing, and networking. He is particularly interested in developing data management techniques (including accessing, routing, indexing, caching, aggregation, dissemination, mining, and query processing) for supporting complex queries and location-based services in a wide spectrum of networking and mobile environments such as peer-to-peer networks, mobile ad-hoc networks, wireless sensor networks, and wireless broadcast systems. Meanwhile, he also works on information integration/retrieval, Social Networking/Compting, Security, XML and object-oriented databases. He has published more than 180 technical papers on these topics. Recently, his research interests have been geared towards issues in location-based social networks.