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Seminar: Quantifying Social vs. Antisocial Behavior in Email Networks

On Friday March 9, we will have a seminar by Virgilio Almeida from the
Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil. Prof. Almeida will be visiting
Poly for three months (March to May), so this is a good opportunity to become
familiar with his research interests.
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<b>Topic of talk</b>: Email graphs have been used to illustrate general properties of
social networks of communication and collaboration. However,
increasingly, the majority of email traffic reflects opportunistic,
rather than symbiotic social relations. Here we use e-mail data
drawn from a large university to construct directed graphs of email
exchange that quantify the differences between social and antisocial
behaviors in networks of communication. We show that while structural
characteristics typical of other social networks are shared to a
large extent by the legitimate component they are not characteristic
of antisocial traffic.