Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

Human social activities naturally are represented in a form of social networks. Since old ages, it has been noted the great power of the “word-of-mouth” effects, which is also called the “social influence strength”. Nowadays, the popularity of social platforms makes it easier to obtain, manipulate and utilize the power of social influence. Then, kinds of information are spread out much more quickly and widely than ever before. Thus, it raises a new problem: how to effectively utilize social influence to affect the largest number of people? This is known as the Influence Maximization (IM) problem. Furthermore, what if social influence is utilized to promote products? This is known as the Revenue Maximization (RM) problem. In this talk, some of my achievements regarding the IM and RM will be shared.

Chih-Hua Tai is currently an associate professor in Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taipei University, New Taipei City, Taiwan. She received her B.S. degree in Computer Science from National Chengchi University (NCCU), Taipei, Taiwan, and Ph.D. degree from Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University (NTU), Taipei, Taiwan. She was a postdoctoral researcher at Research Center for IT innovation from August 2011 to July 2012, and a lecturer at Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST), Taipei, Taiwan from February 2012 to July 2012. Her research interests include privacy-preserving data mining, healthcare data mining, and social computing and marketing. She received the best paper award of the 2015 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2015).