Distinguished Lecture Series presents Jon Kleinberg

Jon Kleinberg, Tisch University Professor from Cornell University presents Meme-tracking, Scheduling, and the Dynamics of the News Cycle".

• Date: October 15, 2009
• Time: 4:00 pm
• Location: CSIC Building, Room 1115

The flow of news through on-line networks has created a complex landscape of media sources and led to rich datasets that provide glimpses into how news is produced, shaped, and consumed. We begin by discussing methods for studying how news stories spread through such a system, using an approach that tracks short pieces of as they travel and mutate across news sources. This type of analysis can be effective at capturing temporal patterns in the news over a daily time-scale --- in particular, the succession of story lines that evolve, compete for attention, and collectively produce an effect that commentators refer to as the `news cycle.' We then show how a detailed analysis of temporal dynamics can suggest novel optimization problems in the scheduling of news stories and other on-line media. Specifically, given a supply of featured content and data on user attention over time, we consider how to sequence the content in a way that maximizes the size of the audience.

This is joint work with Lars Backstrom and Jure Leskovec. Read more...

View slides and presentation: http://www.cs.umd.edu/talks/dls/2009/kleinberg/