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The Social Hourglass: Enabling Socially-aware Applications and Services

SocialAwareApps We invite you on Thursday the 9th of January 2014 at 14:00 in room ED010 to the presentation of Associate Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering from the University of South Florida on "The Social Hourglass: Enabling Socially-aware Applications and Services".

The abstract of the presentation is:
Recent Internet applications, such as online social networks and the widely adopted user-generated content tools, expose a wealth of social information. Aggregated, this wealth of social data could be efficiently mined to improve the performance of traditional distributed applications and to enable a whole set of novel applications.
Following the inspiration of the hourglass architecture of the Internet, this talk argues that an infrastructure that manages social data from a variety of sources is likely to provide better accuracy in quantifying social relationships and better support for a variety of future social applications. The talk will introduce the Social Hourglass architecture that includes social sensors that report the interactions between users, a personal aggregator of social information, a data management service that builds and maintains an augmented social graph, and a set of social inference functions as this service’s API for social applications.

This main thread of work catalyzed two other research investigations that will be presented: social privacy implemented as contextual integrity and the social contagion of cheating in online video games.

A short bio of Adriana Iamnitchi follows:
Adriana Iamnitchi is associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of South Florida (now on sabbatical at Telefonica Research). Her research interests are in distributed systems, with emphasis on designing, implementing and experimenting with algorithms, services and applications for large-scale networked-systems. In particular, Iamnitchi's work spans socially-aware distributed systems, system characterization for Grids and peer-to-peer networks, data management in distributed scientific collaborations, and social networks characterization. Iamnitchi received her PhD from University of Chicago in 2003 after which she joined Duke University as a Visiting Assistant Professor before joining University of South Florida in 2005. Iamnitchi received the US National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2010.