Reverse Engineering the Web and Information Networks: From Structure to Knowledge




Vwani Roychowdhury

Professor of Electrical Engineering
University of California, Los Angeles

Huang Engineering Center, Room 300
Stanford University
Friday, November 12, 2010

Abstract

The Internet has enabled the emergence of global-scale information networks, such as the world wide web and the various social media and ecommerce transaction portals. These overlay networks provide an unprecedented venue for information sharing, collaboration, and competition for ideas and attention. For the first time, information scientists, sociologists, economists, and engineers have the opportunity to investigate and manipulate a purely organic information system, as mysterious and complex as any physical system. It provides a rich platform for both analysis and design. In the analysis phase, one looks for robust structures in the underlying information flow and connection patterns, so as to develop micro-scale or agent based models where individual actions or stochastic protocols give rise to the empirically observed collective structures. In the design phase, one designs and implements new coordination mechanisms; for example, auction mechanisms for allocating advertisement space on web pages, or protocols for selecting influential ideas and articles in a social media environment. A fertile collaborative field has developed involving information theory, thermodynamics and statistical physics, and social sciences. Examples that we shall discuss include the emergence of power-law networks with community structures and recent work on the distillation of knowledge from large scale processing of content on the web.

Speaker Bio

Vwani P. Roychowdhury received his B.Tech. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from IIT Kanpur, and Stanford University, respectively. From 1991 to 1996, he was a faculty member at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University and then joined the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has been a full Professor of Electrical Engineering since 1998. He has worked in several areas related to Information sciences, and the most recent topics include quantum computing and information, and mining and modeling of complex systems and information networks. He has published more than 200 journal and conference papers, book chapters, and books. His recent research work on the Web has also led to the founding of two Silicon Valley startups.

9.16.2010 dmm