Dynamical Processes on Large Networks (CS Seminar Lecture Series)

How do contagions spread in population networks? Which group should we market to, for maximizing product penetration? Will a given YouTube video go viral? Who are the best people to vaccinate? What happens when two products compete? Any insights on these problems, involving dynamical processes on networks, promise great scientific as well as commercial value.

In this talk, we present a multi-pronged attack on such research questions, which includes: (a) Theoretical results on the tipping-point behavior of fundamental models; (b) Scalable Algorithms for changing the behavior of these processes, like for immunization, marketing etc.; and (c) Empirical Studies on tera-bytes of data for developing more realistic information-diffusion models. The problems we focus on are central in surprisingly diverse areas: from cyber-security, epidemiology and public health, viral marketing to spreading of hashtags on Twitter and propagation of memes on blogs.

B. Aditya Prakash (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~badityap) is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He got his B.Tech (in CS) from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) - Bombay. He has published 14 refereed papers in major venues and holds two U.S. patents. His interests include Data Mining, Applied Machine Learning and Databases, with emphasis on large real-world networks and time-series. Some of the inter-disciplinary questions he investigates deal with identifying the precise role of networks in diffusion of contagion (like viruses, products, ideas). The mission of his research is to enable us to understand and eventually influence such processes for our benefit.

The Computer Science Seminar Lecture Series is a collection of weekly lectures about topics at the forefront of contemporary computer science research, given by speakers knowledgeable in their field of study. These speakers come from a variety of different technical and geographic backgrounds, with many of them traveling from other universities across the globe to come here and share their knowledge. These weekly lectures were recorded with an HD video camera, edited with Apple Final Cut Pro X, and outputted in such a way that the resulting .mp4 video files were economical to store and stream utilizing the university's limited bandwidth and disk space resources.