Network Analysis of Online Behavior Chicago-Tsinghua Conference, 2016

The University of Chicago Center in Beijing
20th floor, Culture Plaza
No. 59A Zhong Guan Cun Street
Haidian District Beijing 100872

The conference goal were to launch new collaborative research bringing together American and Chinese scholars in big data analyses informed by deeper understanding of the social science mechanisms by which social networks display and affect behavior, supported by University of Chicago Center in Beijing and The Tsinghua Center for Social Network Research.

About the Speakers

Yanjie Bian

Professor of Sociology

University of Minnesota

Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Director, Institute for Empirical Social Science Research

Xi’an Jiaotong University

Professor Bian has made contributions to guanxi networks. In addition to his earlier works on the efficacies of strong ties in China and Singapore, his most recent publications on the prevalence and the rising significance of guanxi in China’s reform era include “Corporate Social Capital in Guanxi Culture” (with Lei Zhang, 2014, Research in the Sociology of Organizations), “Information and Favoritism: The Network Effect on Wage Income in China” (with Xianbi Huang and Lei Zhang, 2015, Social Networks), “Beyond the Strength of Social Ties” (with Xianbi Huang, 2015, American Behavioral Scientist), and “The Guanxi Influence on Occupational Attainment in Urban China” (with Xianbi Huang, 2015, Chinese Journal of Sociology).

Professor Bian was a student in the 1981 Nankai University Sociology Class taught by, among others, Peter Blau, Fei Xiaotong, and Nan Lin. He received his PhD in sociology from State University of New York at Albany. His past positions include Chair Professor, Head, and Associate Dean of Social Science and the Founding Director of Survey Research Center, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is a co-founder (with Professor Li Lulu) of the Chinese General Social Survey and current board member for the International Network for Social Network Analysis. Author of 11 books and more than 100 research articles, his current projects include the development of the sociology of guanxi, a panel study about networks and jobs in Chinese cities, and East Asian social networks. He was recognized as one of the 2014 and 2015 Elsevier most-cited Chinese researchers in social science.

Ron Burt

Hobart W. Williams Professor of

Sociology and Strategy

Booth School of Business

University of Chicago

Professor Burt’s work describes social networks creating advantage. Applications focus on personal networks and the network structure of markets. In addition to computer software and articles in research journals, Professor Burt’s last three books are the one that proposed the concept of structural holes, Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition (1992, Harvard University Press), a broad review of links between network structure and performance, Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital (2005, Oxford University Press), and argument and evidence on the substantial extent to which network advantage depends on the person at the center of the network, Neighbor Networks: Competitive Advantage Local and Personal (2010, Oxford University Press, which received the 2011 Academy of Management George R. Terry Book Award for the work that most advanced management knowledge in the last two years). Research and teaching materials can be downloaded at http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/ronald.burt.

Professor Burt’s college work at Johns Hopkins University included pre-medical training, physiological psychology, and behavioral science. He graduated from the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. in sociology, then was on the faculty at the University of California Berkeley, SUNY Albany, and Columbia University before returning to join the University of Chicago faculty in 1993. In 1999, he began a leave of absence to learn more about European business as the Shell Professor of Human Resources at INSEAD.  In 2000, he began a leave of absence to learn more about practical implementation as the Vice President of Strategic Learning in Raytheon Company. H continues today at the University of Chicago.

Yunsong Chen

Associate Professor of Sociology

Nanjing University

Deputy Chief of Xuanwu District Government

Nanjing

Yunsong Chen is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Nanjing University; the Deputy Chief of Xuanwu District Government in Nanjing. Supported by the Clarendon Scholarship, he earned his D.Phil. in Sociology at Nuffield College, the University of Oxford in 2012. He has broad research interests within the fields of social networks and social relations. To date, his research includes empirically assessing the counterfactual causal effects of social networks in labor markets under different institutional contexts, using ‘big data’ to identify the long-term relationship between macro-level social- economic indicators and cultural phenomena, and subjective wellbeing and social status in China. His recent and forthcoming articles appear in leading English-language journals including Social Networks, Social Science Research, and British Journal of Sociology, as well as top Chinese journals including Social Science in China, Journal of Chinese Sociology and Chinese Journal of Sociology. In 2015 he was awarded various honors including the Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award by the Lu Xueyi Sociology Development Foundation, and the Fei Hsiao-Tung Scholarship for Distinguished Teachers.

His newer research agenda extends his earlier research to broader fields with novel data from historical and contemporary China. He is organizing a project gleaning data from historical records to visualize social networks among ten thousand Chinese poets in the Tang and Song Dynasties to assess whether social networks affected their career and literary success. Aside from social network analysis, some of his current projects make use of information extracted from enormous volumes of digitized data (e.g., Google Books N-gram corpus, New York Times corpus, Google, Baidu, Sina-Microblog, to name a few) to conduct sociological analysis. For example, he analyzes the relationship between stock market and online emotions in China, the connection between suicide in written media and suicide rate in the U.S., and the international visibility of thousands of cities in the world city system.

Peng Cui

Assistant Professor

Computer Science Department

Tsinghua University

Peng Cui is now an Assistant Professor in Tsinghua University, China. He received his PhD degree from Tsinghua University in 2010. He is an active researcher dedicated to novel algorithms and systems in social network analysis and social multimedia computing, and he is keen to promote the convergence of social media data mining and multimedia computing technologies. Dr. Cui has strong backgrounds in both data mining and multimedia communities. He has published more than 50 papers in prestigious conferences and journals in data mining and multimedia, including ACM MM, SIGKDD, SIGIR, AAAI, IEEE TMM, IEEE TKDE, IEEE TIP etc. His recent research won the ICDM 2015 Best Student Paper Award, SIGKDD 2014 Best Paper Finalist, IEEE ICME 2014 Best Paper Award, ACM MM12 Grand Challenge Multimodal Award, and MMM13 Best Paper Award. He is the Area Chair of ICDM 2016, ACM MM 2014-2015, IEEE ICME 2014-2015, ICASSP 2013, Associate Editor of ACM TOMM, Elsivier Journal on Neurocomputing, Frontier of Computer Science journal, Guest Editor of IEEE Intelligent Systems, Information Retrieval journal, and co- organized several special sessions and workshops in ICMR, ICME, ACM MM and WSDM.

Zengru Di

Professor, Dean

School of Systems Science

Beijing Normal University

Professor Zengru Di is now the Dean of the School of systems Science, Beijing Normal University. He is the Leader of Discipline Appraisal Group on Systems Science of the Academic Degree Committee of the State Council, People’s Republic of China (2009-present), Member of the Academic Degree Committee of Beijing Normal University, Vice President of the Systems Engineering Society of China.

His research interests rely on the area of the Complex Networks, Self- organization Theory and its application in socio-economic and biological systems. The problems are focused on the structure and function of complex networks, collective behavior of multi-agent systems, and the emergent properties of complex systems. Professor Zengru Di is editor in chief or editor of several academic journal, including All About Systems and Control (in Chinese), Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization，Journal of Systems Science and Complexity , Journal of Systems Science and Information, Systems Engineering-Theory & Practice (in Chinese) and so on.

James A. Evans

Professor of Sociology, member of the Committee on the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science,

Senior Fellow at the Computation Institute, Director of Knowledge Lab (knowledgelab.org), and Director of the Computational Social Science Program (macss.uchicago.edu)

Department of Sociology

University of Chicago

James Evans’ work explores the sources, structure, dynamics and consequences of modern knowledge. Evans is particularly interested in the relation of markets to science and knowledge more broadly, and how evolutionary and generative models can inform our understanding of collective representations, experiences and certainty. He has studied how industry collaboration shapes the ethos, secrecy and organization of academic science; the web of individuals and institutions that produce innovations; and markets for ideas and their creators. Evans has also examined the impact of the Internet on knowledge in society. His work uses natural language processing, the analysis of social and semantic networks, statistical modeling, and field-­‐based observation and interviews. Evans’ research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Mellon and Templeton Foundations and has been published in Science, PNAS, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, Social Studies of Science, Administrative Science Quarterly and other journals. His work has been featured in Nature, the Economist, Atlantic Monthly, Wired, NPR, BBC, El Pais, CNN and many other outlets.

Xiaoming Fu

University of Göttingen

Xiaoming Fu received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 2000. He was then a research staff at the Technical University Berlin until joining the University of Göttingen, Germany in 2002, where he has been a professor in computer science and heading the Computer Networks Group since 2007. He has spent research visits at Cambridge, Columbia, UCLA, Tsinghua, Uppsala and UPMC, and is an IEEE senior member and Distinguished Lecturer.

Dr. Fu’s research interests include Internet-­‐based systems, applications, and social networks. He is currently an editorial board member of IEEE Communications Magazine, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, Elsevier Computer Networks, and Computer Communications, and has published over 150 peer-­‐reviewed papers in renowned journals and international conference proceedings; more recently book co-­‐edited by him, “Social Network Analysis:  Interdisciplinary Approaches and Case Studies” will be published by CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group in 2016. He has served on the program or organization committees of several networking conferences such as ACM MOBICOM, MOBIHOC, CoNEXT, COSN, IEEE INFOCOM, ICNP, ICDCS, ANCS, IWQoS, CCW, IFIP Networking and is currently general co-­‐chair of ACM ICN’16 and program co-­‐chair of ACM CFI’16 and IEEE/ACM/VDE NetSys’17. He is a founding steering committee member of ACM COSN, MobiArch and HotPlanet. He has served as secretary (2008-­‐2010) and vice chair (2010-­‐2012) of IEEE Communications Society Technical Committee on Computer Communications (TCCC), as well as chair (2011-­‐2013) of the Internet Technical Committee (ITC), a joint committee of the Internet Society and the IEEE Communications Society. He is currently the coordinator of three EU FP7 projects (GreenICN, CleanSky and MobileCloud).

Dr. Fu is the recipient of the ACM ICN 2014 and IEEE LANMAN 2013 Best Paper Awards, and the 2005 University of Göttingen Foundation Award for Exceptional Publications by Young Scholars. For more information: http://user.informatik.uni­goettingen.de/~fu/

Hong Huang

Ph.D. Student Institute of Computer Science

University of Göttingen

Hong Huang is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Göttingen, Germany. She received her M.E. degree in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 2012. She has been a visiting student at the University of Chicago, Tsinghua University, Fudan University and Nanjing University. During her graduate, she has also been an intern at NEC Lab and SAP.

Her research interests lie in social network analysis, social influence and data mining. Her current work mainly focus on triad structure in social networks. For example, she examined triadic closure process and interaction dynamics within a triad, and proposed mathematical models to predict these patterns.

Yong Li

Assistant Professor,

Department of Electronic Engineering

Tsinghua University

Dr. Yong Li received the B.S. and Ph.D degree in Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Tsinghua University in 2007 and 2012, respectively. During 2012 and 2013, he was a Visiting Research Associate with Telekom Innovation Laboratories and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology respectively. During 2013 to 2014, he was a Visiting Scientist with the University of Miami. He is currently a Faculty Member of the Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University. His research interests are in the areas of Mobile Computing and Social Networks, Urban Computing and Vehicular Networks, and Network Science and Future Internet.

Dr. Li has served as General Chair, Technical Program Committee (TPC) Chair, and TPC Member for several international workshops and conferences. He is currently the Associate Editor of Journal of Communications and Networking and EURASIP Journal of Wireless Communications and Networking (both are SCI Indexed).

Nan Lin

Oscar L. Tang Family

Professor of Sociology

Emeritus

Department of Sociology

Duke University

Professor Lin, born in China, graduated from Tunghai University, Taiwan, and received his doctorate degree from Michigan State University. He taught at Johns Hopkins University and the State University of New York at Albany, before joining Duke University as professor of sociology and director of the Asian Pacific Institute. His primary research interests include: social capital, social networks, economic sociology, social stratification, social support and coping, and China. For the past three decades, he has endeavored to develop an integrated approach to social capital: in theory (e.g. Social Capital: A Theory of Social Structure and Action, Cambridge 2001), measurement (i.e., the position generator; Social Capital: An International Research Program, edited with Bonnie Erickson, Oxford 2008) and research (e.g., a three-society study; Social Capital and Its Institutional Contingency: A Study of the United States, Taiwan and China, edited with Yang- chih Fu and Chih-jou Chen, Routledge 2014). He also edited four volumes of Social Capital: Critical Concepts in Social Sciences (Routledge 2011). Lin is an academician at the Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He delivered the Fei Xiao-tong Memorial Lecture at Peking University in 2008, and was honored, also in 2008, at the “Re-construction and Development of Sociology in China and Nan Lin’s Intellectual Thoughts” at Tsinghua University. He holds an honorary doctorate degree from the National Chengchi University, and numerous distinguished visiting or honorary professorships in China and Taiwan. He received the Distinguished Research Contribution Award from the International Association of Chinese Management Research in 2010 and was the Vice President of the American Sociological Association (1999-2000).  Currently he is working on several projects including: (1) capitalism in China, (2) social networks embedding economy, and (3) the development of home owners associations in China.

Luo, Jar-Der

Sociology Department

Tsinghua University

Luo, Jar-Der is a professor of Sociology Dept., Tsinghua University in Beijing, president of Chinese Network for Social Network Studies, and chairman of Tsinghua Social Network Research Center. He earned his Ph.D degree in Sociology Dept. of State U. of New York at Stony Brook.  He researches numerous topics in social network studies, including social capital, trust, social network analysis in big data, self-organization process and Chinese indigenous management researches, such as guanxi and guanxi circle. 

Luo Jar-Der, with a group of voluntary network theorists, organized Chinese Network for Social Network Studies (in brief, CNSNS) in 2005. Its purposes aim at promoting Network Theories and Social Network Analysis in China and developing network theories suited for Chinese management. Chinese always describe themselves as a “Ren-Ching society”, that is, roughly saying, a society built upon social ties (guanxi) and favor exchanges (Ren-Ching jiau-huan).

Luo Jar-Der organized Community Revitalization Research Center in Tsinghua U., which aims at doing experiments in communities and establishing a model for sustainable revitalization in urban and rural areas that emphasizes sustainability of the local ecology, economy, and social systems. We will endeavor to implement a revitalization model combining private-public partnership and sustainable concepts into practice, incorporating scientific planning, balanced development, step-by-step implementation and self-reliance of local community into our plan.

Huawei Shen

Associate Professor

Institute of Computing Technology

Chinese Academy of Sciences

Dr. Huawei Shen works on social network analysis and social media analytics. His research topics cover community detection, influence maximization, popularity prediction, social recommendation, and collective behavior analysis. He has more than 50 publications in prestigious journals, e.g., Science and PNAS, and conferences, e.g., AAAI, ACM SIGIR. He published one monographs about community detection, i.e., “Community structure of complex networks”. He was the PC member of many conferences, including IJCAI, WSDM, ASONAM, CWSM, SocInfo, CSoNet. He also serves as Referee/Reviewer of more than 20 journals, such as PNAS, IEEE TIST, IEEE TKDE, ACM TKDD. Details about research could be found in http://www.bigdatalab.ac.cn/~shenhuawei/.

Dr. Huawei Shen graduated from the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, with a Ph.D. of computer science, in 2010. Then he worked at the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences as an Assistant Professor. In 2013, he worked in Northeastern University as a one-year Researcher Scholar. In 2015, he began his teaching career in the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences as a Guest Professor.

Toby E. Stuart

University of California, Berkeley

Toby E. Stuart is the Helzel Chair in Entrepreneurship, Strategy and Innovation; the Faculty Director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship; Associate Dean, External Affairs; and Chair of the Department of Management and Organizations at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. Previously, he has been: The Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; the Arthur J. Samberg Professor and Faculty Director of the Eugene M. Lang Entrepreneurship Center at Columbia Business School; and the Fred G. Steingraber-A.T. Kearney Professor of Leadership & Strategy at University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. He holds an A.B., summa cum laude, in economics from Carleton College.

Professor Stuart is the recipient of the 2007 Kauffman Prize Medal for Distinguished Research in Entrepreneurship, which is granted every second year to recognize one individual’s contributions to entrepreneurship research. He has received the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence at Columbia Business School; the Award for Teaching Excellence at Cornell / NY-Tech; and the Cheit Award for Teaching Excellence for multiple courses at Berkeley Haas. He has won the Administrative Science Quarterly’s Scholarly Contribution (best paper) award, and other recognitions for scholarly contributions. Much of Professor Stuart’s research has examined social networks, particularly their role in entrepreneurship, innovation, and strategy. In some of his current projects, he is investigating email networks, organizational structure and employment outcomes in a variety of companies; matching in online networks; entrepreneurship in technology; and the collaboration network in the academic life sciences. He currently serves as a Department Editor at Management Science, an editorial board member at the Strategic Management Journal, among other editorial roles.

Jie Tang

Associate Professor Department of Computer Science and Technology

Tsinghua University

Professor Tang’s interests include social network analysis, data mining, and machine learning.   He has published more than 200 journal/conference papers and holds 20 patents. His papers have been cited more than 6,000 times (Google Scholar).   He has been a visiting scholar at Cornell University, served as PC Co-­‐Chair of CIKM’16, WSDM’15, ASONAM’15, SocInfo’12, KDD-­‐CUP/Poster/ Workshop/Local/Publication Co-­‐Chair of KDD’11-­‐15, and Associate Editor-­‐in-­‐ Chief of ACM TKDD, Editors of IEEE TKDE/TBD and ACM TIST.  He leads the project AMiner.org for academic social network analysis and mining, which has attracted more than 8 million independent IP accesses from 220 countries/ regions in the world.   He was honored with the Newton Advanced Scholarship Award, CCF Young Scientist Award, and NSFC Excellent Young Scholar.

Yunjie (Calvin) Xu

Professor

Department of Information Management and

Information Systems

School of Management

Fudan University

Dr. Xu obtained his Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from Syracuse University, New York. Before joining Fudan, he was with the National University of Singapore. His research interests cover electronic commerce and knowledge management. In the area of knowledge management, his research focuses on information seeking behavior, including both human interactions with search engines and offline knowledge seeking process in organizational and team setting. In the area of e-commerce, his research focuses on web design and online marketing. In both areas, he applies social network analysis for some research projects.

His recent research interest covers precision online advertising, leveraging both product and individual social networks. His research grants involves major telecom firms in China, i.e., China Mobile and China Telecom, and UnionPay (the China counterpart of VISA/MasterCard).

His research publications appeared in various information systems journals, including Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Association for Information Systems, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology and so on. He is also on the editorial board of four journals.

Christopher B. Yenkey

Assistant Professor

Organiza0ons and Markets

Booth School of Business

University of Chicago

Professor Yenkey’s research extends sociological theories of social diversity, social capital, and inter-group trust to the analysis of market development. This line of work is exemplified by his work on multiple aspects of investor participation in Kenya’s frontier stock market, the Nairobi Securities Exchange. Here, he analyzes how ethnic group boundaries influence the transmission of market information through a diverse society and how coethnicity paradoxically increases investors’ vulnerability to fraud without reducing their trust in the market. Professor Yenkey extends his research on the effects of misconduct on market participation in a new project that uses bilateral country-level data on capital flows to explain variation in foreigners’ reactions to fraud and corruption across African states.

Professor Yenkey received his bachelor degree in economics in 2001 from the University of Texas-Austin, served as a macro-economic forecaster for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City from 2001-2003, and earned his PhD in Economic Sociology at Cornell University in 2011. Professor Yenkey was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Economic Affairs in Nairobi, Kenya from 2008-2010 and was the Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Economy and Society at Cornell University from 2010-2011. His research has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly and Social Forces and has won several awards including the Academy of Management’s William H. Newman Award for Best Dissertation Paper in 2011.

Yun Zhou

Assistant Professor

State Key Laboratory of High Performance Computing

National University of Defense Technology

China

He received his PhD degree from National University of Defense Technology in 2014. He has been a visiting research associate with Prof. Jie Tang and Prof. Jar-Der Luo in Tsinghua University during 2013 to 2014. His research interests lie in social network analysis, natural language processing and robotics. His work was published in prestigious conferences and journals in data mining and artificial intelligence, including IEEE Trans. On Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Trans. On Computers and IEEE Intl. conf. on Data Engineering.