I will be on the lookout for events, conferences, workshops and talks that might be of interest to the community. I will try to balance both academic and business/networking event opportunities -- although the primary focus would be research conferences. Please forward me relevant postings and announcements at akshayjava on Gmail. Looking forward to meeting you at the next conference/venue!
BTW, Here is a nice layout of the events using this cool Yahoo Pipe by Tony Hirst: (aaargh! Typepad! you are killing me with this new editor -- the map shows up in the preview but not on my post -- huh!)
Since attending the talk by Dr. Tufekci on "The New Social Physics", I have been thinking about social capital and how we can quantify it.
Social Capital, is a term used to describe the intrinsic value of social networks. Robert Putnam attributes social capital to "civic engagement" and as an indicator of "communal health". Pierre Bourdieu describes how social capital explains how people find jobs through their social connections. Similarly, the strength of weak links, describes the importance of social relations in job searches.
In general social capital can be described in terms of bridging capital and bonding capital. Bridging capital is the notion that chance, long range social connections, that we build as part of our social interactions, can help us connect with heterogeneous groups. The idea of "bridges" in social relation is again similar to the notion of connectors in the book "Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell. As Gladwell describes it
"Connectors are people who link us to the world ... people with a special gift for bringing the world together"
So how can we quantify the connectors? According to the Wikipedia entry:
"There is no widely held consensus on how to measure social capital, which is one of its weaknesses."
One simple way to explain such relations is to use the analogy of bridges. These are individuals who link across the different departments in your office, they are the researchers who have worked with people from other fields and universities. We all know such people and run to them to find our link to the "other side of the planet". One measure that might be useful in quantifying bridging capital is "Edge betweenness". It is a measure that indicates the number of all pair shortest paths that flow through an edge. In other words, if the edge is removed, many pairs of nodes need to follow a longer path to communicate with each other. Edge-betweenness is also used in some of the community detection techniques. By iteratively removing edges that are most in-between, we can identify the communities that exist in a social network.
Bridging capital is easier to conceptualize than bonding capital. Bonding capital is defined as
"the value assigned to social networks between homogeneous groups of people"
Another way of thinking about bonding capital is as follows: If you were in an urgent need for $500, which you promised to return the next day -- whom would you turn to? The person most likely to lend you the money is one with whom you share a strong bond. In my opinion, one simple way in which bonding capital can be quantified is by measuring the "strength of ties" or the number of common relations you share with another individual. If we think about business partners, it is quite likely that they share the same set of social relationships. Thus their bonding capital will be quite high. By identifying social relationships, which if removed would cause the least effect in the overall shortest path distance between other nodes, we can identify the edges that have a high bonding capital.
Here is a simple example, from the classic karate club dataset. In this graph there are 34 nodes that represent the members of a karate club. During this study the group split into two with half the members going to the founder of the club, node 34 and the rest to the instructor, node 1. Here we can find interesting examples of bridging and bonding capital. The edge between node 33 and node 34 reflect a high bonding capital.. both these nodes have several friends in common. On the other hand the link from 9 to 1 among others are examples of bridging capital.
I would also like to point out a very interesting piece of research by Dr. Tufekci on social relations in Facebook. According to her study, she found that women use Facebook as a means to establish bonding capital while men are trying to increase bridging capital. This is an excellent study on Facebook from a social science perspective and I would highly recommend reading it.
Following are some of the books that I highly recommend for anyone interested in the science behind Social Networks research. I like to call this set of books as the "A Trilogy of Social Network Research in Four Parts".
LinkedDr. Albert-László Barabásiis a pioneer in social networks research. The concepts of preferential attachment and scale-free networks were first proposed by Dr. Barabási. This has led to our understanding of how human communication works, fault tolerance in real-world networks and discovery of several algorithms that describe the growth of networks, community formation. Linked is a story of a researchers quest for answers to complex phenomena from the spread of viruses to behavior of hubs. Both Linked and Sync are books that teach us how the simplest explanation is usually the best. Six DegreesDr. Duncan Watts (Ph.D. student of Dr. Strogatz) presents an excellent look into the recent discoveries in network theory. The book is a tribute to all the academic work that went behind the discovery of small world phenomena, scale free networks and the theory behind search in such complex networks. I particularly enjoyed the book because being in school and working towards a Ph.D., I can really relate to the author's narration of the trials, tribulations and all excitement (yes!) of grad school.
Sync written by Dr. Steven Strogatz, this book was rated as the best of 2003 by Discover magazine. This book talks about how synchrony emerges from a seemingly random and chaotic nature of universe and nature. Its a true science thriller that touches upon complex topics with ease and finesse. It is an inspiring book that truly reflects the passion of someone who is excited about his work, research. Dr. Strogatz has the ability to engage even someone who may have a very little understanding of the subject and describe complex theories in really simple terms.
Nexus This was an interesting read that complemented the Six Degrees and Sync quite nicely. Dr. Marc Buchanan talks about how networks that seem random are actually quite closely linked. The book is a journey from the early days of social networks research and Milgrams experiment of "six degrees of separation" to the most recent discoveries in Physics, Biology and Computer Science that deal with network theory.
Of these I am currently reading Sync. I read both Linked and Six Degrees simultaneously and really enjoyed how the two books complemented each other and show how two scientists approach the same problem in very different, and equally exciting ways. [Update] This post should have really been titled "A Researchers Guide to Social Networks: A trilogy in five parts" with the inclusion of "Tipping point". However, despite being a great book, I felt that Tipping point was not as scientifically in-depth and hence decided to leave it at "A trilogy in four parts". But feel free to include tipping point in this reading list since it is a book that highlights some important ideas and in many ways has made the subject appealing to a vast audience.
Oh BTW, Trilogy here was a reference to the three main underlying themes in these books: scale-free networks, small world phenomena and emergence/Synchronization in such systems.
Rediscovering the Passion, Beauty, Joy, and Awe: Making Computing Fun Again
The following post is a summary of the talk by Dr. Eric Roberts given at UMBC on April 24, 2007 2008.
Unfortunately, I did not have time to edit the notes and post it sooner. I strongly feel that this is an important subject and academia, industry and schools need to work together on this issue. I think many readers of this blog are equally passionate about this topic and would be interested in Dr. Roberts talk. The PPT of the talk is available here.
Here is my attempt to highlight some key points:
Dr. Roberts addresses how we can make undergraduate education fun ... Again. ("In case it is not already" -- Marie DesJardins). During his role as the chair of the ACM education board, Dr. Roberts has been greatly concerned about this topic.
Int his talk he mentions that there is a paradox in this field: computing industry offers the best employment opportunities, salaries yet the enrollments have gone down -- almost by 50%. And in some schools it is probably as high as an 80% decline. The statistics are alarming more so in women and minorities. If you compare Computer science with fields like Biology, where there is an overproduction of degrees you find that on an average one must do two postdocs before applying for a tenure track position! In Computer Science -- the demand is increasing but the supply is really low resulting in 2/3 people being hired from outside (not outsourced but people hired from non-CS backgrounds).
Dr. Roberts addresses some reasons for this paradox:
1) Fears about long term economic stability of employment This is primarily due to the perception of lack of jobs and fear of outsourcing. However, looking at data about offshoring -- there are more jobs despite outsourcing. Number of computer programmers hired are going down but computer scientists and software engineers is up.
Dr. Roberts suggests an interesting thought experiments: Say you are a company that has the option of hiring $200k/year engineer in USA / a $75k/year engineer in Bangalore... both very talented and have the potential to generate 1M -- what do you do?
Most people would think that the reasoning would lead to hiring just the 75K/year engineer in Bangalore however, if you wear the HR hat you would try hire them both!!! Since they both have the potential to generate the 1M /year -- which is profitable.
2) kind of exposure to computing at elementary and secondary school levels AP test in computer science use to be based on pascal in '94, CPP in 95 and JAVA in 2003. The problem is that it is difficult to find good teachers for advanced programming languages. Additionally, computing skills are becoming harder to teach and teachers dont have the resources to keep up. Moreover the education board views computing courses as "Vocational" almost at par with shop courses. Finally schools are evaluated in terms of math and science performance alone. So good computer science teachers are being moved to teach math/science classes. Finally the schools only care about teaching kids toools!! Like...powerpoint!! WTH?
3) image of work in the field -- no longer seems fun?
"Has anyone considered the possibility that it is not fun anymore?" -- Donald Knuth Oct 11, 2006
What are the reasons? Is it because there is no chance to make a legacy? Has programming is becoming harder? Or is it because startups are too fragile? Dr. Roberts points out that people would rather be Dilberts boss than Dilbert...perhaps this explains why economics and management branches are most popular.
4) University curriculum is broken somehow However, there is a variation in enrolment by time and in some cases enrollment seems independent of curriculum. Student decide not to take before they even look at the curriculum! And those who do land up taking the classes love the courses... but decide not to major in cs anyway. This is quite alarming.
Here are a few of Dr. Robert's suggestions on what we can do:
Realize that the problem is beyond just the university level
Press govt and industry to improve computing education
Emphasize the fact that programming is a key to the field
Restore passion...and make computing Fun!
From my own perspective, this problem is not just here, in the US educational system but seems to be a greater worldwide issue. For example, in India, a small Montessori school that my mom helps to run, is trying innovative methods to involve children in computer education from early on. However, the lack of resources, good computer programming teachers has been a great challenge for them. Additionally, when it comes to primary level education, there arent may educational tools that introduce children to computing. Kids are extremely fast with learning powerpoint, getting online and playing games and it would be great to build software that could teach children basics of programming in a fun and exciting way. These tools need to have a way in which children can take something "tangible" back home to show to their parents and give them a sense of actually building something cool!
