Mining community structures in sensor network research collaboration

Invited Speaker: Alberto Pepe, UCLA and Marko Rodriguez, LANL
Date: May 2, 2008
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Venue: Boelter Hall 4760

Abstract

At CENS, the processes that drive knowledge production and dissemination are "embedded" within the social and technical systems employed by the research community. This talk will report on ongoing work directed at the study of the emergence and development of such knowledge dissemination networks, by the study of collaborative structural communities within CENS. Structural communities are cliquish groups that are made salient by the underlying structure of the network analyzed. In this case, the network under study consists of a coauthorship network created from the bibliographic record of the broader CENS collaboration. The detected structural communities of couthorship will be compared to the socioacademic communities, i.e. the social, academic and demographic groupings that exist in a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary research center like CENS. The results of the comparative analysis reveal that community structures best represent groupings of individuals working in the same academic department and at the same institution. The collected social and bibliographic data also serves as the starting point for the development of knowledge layer for sharing and publication of contextual, bibliographic and socialinformation.

Biography

Alberto Pepe is a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Information of the University of California, Los Angeles. He currently works as a graduate research assistant in the statistics and data practices group of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing. Prior to starting his PhD, he developed digital library software and promoted open access among particle physicists at CERN, Switzerland. He also worked in the scientific visualization department of CINECA, the Italian Scientific Consortium, based at the University of Bologna. He holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science and a B.Sc. in Astrophysics, both from University College London, UK.

Marko A. Rodriguez is a Postdoctoral Student at the Center for Non-Linear Studies of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He obtained a PhD and Masters in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Cruz and a BSc in Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego. At the Los Alamos National Laboratory, he also worked as a Graduate Research Assistant on the Digital Library Research Team and the Complex Systems Group. He is also a visiting researcher at the Center for Evolution, Complexity, and Cognition at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.