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Lada Adamic wins prestigious NSF CAREER Award
(Mar 2008) Assistant Professor Lada Adamic has won a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for proposed work on the social dynamics of information in virtual spaces.
"These are extremely prestigious awards given to the top young researchers in the U.S. every year," says Thomas Finholt, associate dean of research and innovation at SI. "This is a great honor for Lada and great recognition for the School of Information."
The CAREER Award is for $438,000 over five years. Nationally, the NSF grants approximately 300 of these awards each year in recognition of academic and research promise.
Adamic's award will support her work analyzing online interactions to develop a model of how community structure affects the spread of information.
"More and more we conduct our lives in the digital domain," says Adamic, "from the way we acquire and share information, to the way we communicate, socialize, and organize.
"Such activities leave behind traces of themselves, digital breadcrumb trails that can be analyzed for insight into online activities and how they're connected."
These digital traces range from citation patterns among millions of blogs (bloggers as a breed tend to regularly point to what other bloggers have said) to the ways avatars -- virtual selves -- interact in online worlds such as Second Life.
Adamic will study these traces on an unprecedented scale and with greater accuracy than ever before. From that study she hopes to gain insight into a set of information diffusion and social network phenomena:
- The interplay among social network structure, community affiliation, and online interaction.
- The effect of social network structure and community boundaries on information diffusion and information change.
- The range of influence of individuals as it relates to the structure of their social network and their community affiliation.
- The dynamics of how opinions form in networks of overlapping communities.
Understanding how these effects develop in today's highly connected and community-focused online environments has important implications not just for public policy and marketing, but also for the dissemination of innovation, Adamic says.
She will put theoretical models of information diffusion to the test by assembling three very large scale, high resolution network data sets. One set will encompass the interactions of millions of users of the online virtual world Second Life, and a second set will comprise millions of blogs.
To gather the third data set, Adamic will develop a novel information and opinion sharing application that will map precisely how information is propagated in social networks.
"As people pass polls or interesting tidbits to one another, the URLs contain a tracer that can reconstruct the path that the information took through the social network," Adamic explains. Her application would create a visualization of the information flow as the items spread.
"My plan is to make these traces explicit, so that people wouldn't unwittingly reveal their social network if they didn't wish to do so."
Beyond testing existing models, Adamic will also incorporate network community boundaries and overlap into new models that both describe and predict how information diffuses and how opinions form.
The results of all of this research will feed directly into the network and data analysis courses Adamic teaches within the new social computing and information retrieval specializations in SI's master's program.
The work will also add to a collection of online data sets, analysis tools, and tutorials she already shares for educational and research purposes. She plans to adapt some of these online tutorials as interactive exhibits in Second Life.
And to educate an even younger audience, she will help develop Discovery Carts on the topic of social networks in collaboration with the Ann Arbor Hands-on Museum.
In addition to her appointment at SI, Adamic holds positions within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at U-M.
The School of Information has been home to past CAREER Award winners Marshall Van Alstyne and Mark Ackerman.
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