Velammal College of Engineering and Technology, Madurai.

Department of Information Technology

CS8085 Social Network Analysis
Question Bank

UNIT I INTRODUCTION
Introduction to Semantic Web: Limitations of current Web - Development of Semantic Web -
Emergence of the Social Web - Social Network analysis: Development of Social Network Analysis -
Key concepts and measures in network analysis - Electronic sources for network analysis: Electronic
discussion networks, Blogs and online communities - Web-based networks - Applications of Social
Network Analysis.
Text Book:
Peter Mika, ―Social Networks and the Semantic Web‖, First Edition, Springer 2007

Part A

1. What is semantic web? (K1)

The semantic web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning,
better enabling computers and people to work in co-operation.

2. List limitations of the current web search. (K1)

The current Web has its limitations when it comes to: 1. Finding relevant information 2. Extracting relevant
information 3. Combining and reusing information

3. What is social network analysis? (K1)

Social network analysis [SNA] is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people,
groups, organizations, computers, URLs, and other connected information/knowledge entities. The nodes
in the network are the people and groups while the links show relationships or flows between the nodes.

4. List the principles of Social Network Analysis? (K1)

 Actors and their actions are viewed as interdependent rather than independent, autonomous units.
 Relational ties (linkages) between actors are channels for transfer or “flow” of resources.
 Network models focusing on individuals view the network structure environment as providing
opportunities for or constraints on individual action.
 Network models conceptualize structure as lasting patterns of relations among actors.

5. What are the features of Social Network Analysis? (K1)

 Structural intuition
 Systematic relational data
 Graphic representation and mathematical or computational models.

6. What is needed for data integration in Web? (K1)

Data integration involves combining data residing in different sources and providing users with a unified
view of these data. This process becomes significant in a variety of situations, which include both
commercial domains. Data integration appears with increasing frequency as the volume and the need to
share existing data explodes. It has become the focus of extensive theoretical work, and numerous open
problems remain unsolved.

7. Define Web Community. (K1)

An online community is a group of people with common interests who use the Internet (web sites, email,
instant messaging, etc.) to communicate, work together and pursue their interests over time.

8. Define following terminologies from network analysis: actor, Dyad, Triad (K1)

Actor: Actor is discrete individual, corporate or collective social units.

Dyad: It is a tie between two actors and consists of a pair of actors and the tie(s) between them.

Triad: Triples of actors and associated ties. A subset of three actors and the tie(s) among them.

9. Define following terms: Group, Relation

Group: It is the collection of all actors on which ties are to be measured.

Relation: It is the collection of ties of a specific kind among members of a group.

10. What is community detection?

Modularity maximization. In spite of its known drawbacks, one of the most widely used methods for
community detection is modularity maximization. Modularity is a benefit function that measures the
quality of a particular division of a network into communities.

11. Define Graph Density. (K1)

Graph Density is defined as the total number of observed lines in a graph divided by the total number of
possible lines in the same graph. Density ranges from 0 to 1.

Number of lines ( L )
Density (D) = Number of points ( Number of points−1 )
2

12. What is affiliation networks? (K1)

Affiliation networks contain information about the relationships between two set of nodes: a set of subjects
and a set of affiliations. An affiliation network can be formally represented as a bipartite graph, also known
as a two-mode network.

13. Define Duality. (K1)

A distinctive feature of affiliation networks is duality. i.e., events can be described as collections of
individuals affiliated with them and actors can be described as collections of events with which they are
affiliated.
14. Explain adjacency matrix? (K1)

An adjacency matrix is a square matrix with one row and one column for each vertex in a network. The
content of a cell in the matrix indicates the presence and possibly the sign or value of a tie from the vertex
represented by the row to the vertex represented by the column.

15. What is transitivity model? (K1)

The transitivity modle applies to an unsigned directed network if it consists of cliques such that cliques
within ranks are not related and cliques between ranks are related by null dyads or asymmetric dyads
pointing towards the higher rank.

16. what is two mode network? (K1)

In a two-mode networ, vertices are divided into two sets and vertices can only be related to vertices in the
other set.

17. What are the benefits of affiliation network? (K1)

 Affiliationso f actors with events provide a direct linkage between actors through memberships in
events, or between events through common memberships.
 Affiliations provide conditions that facilitate the formation of pairwise ties between actors.
 Affiliations enable us to model the relaitonships between actors and events as a whole system.

18. Define Recall. (K1)

Recall is the ratio of the number relevant records retrieved to the total number of relevant records in the
database. It is usually expressed as percentage.

19. Define Precision. (K1)

Precision is the ratio of the number of relevant records retrieved to the total number of irrelevant and
relevant records retrieved.

20. Write notes on Personal networks. (K2)

Personal network is a set of human contacts known to an individual, with whom that individual would
expect to interact at intervals to support a given set of activities. In other words, a personal network is a
group of caring, dedicated people who are committed to maintain a relationship with a person in order to
support a given set of activities.

Part B

1. Explain in detail about semantic web and its benefits. (K2)

2. Summarize about Social Network Analysis. (K2)

3. Explain the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and RDF schema. (K2)

4. Summarize about Web based Networks? (K2)

5. Outline Generic Architecture of Semantic Web Applications. (K2)

6. Explain the following: (K2)
a) Electronic Discussion Networks
b) Blogs and Online communities
c) Web based Networks
d) Personal Networks

Part C

1. Explain the business applications of Social Network Analysis. (K2)

2. Explain the static and dynamic properties of social networks. (K2)

UNIT II MODELLING, AGGREGATING AND KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION

Ontology and their role in the Semantic Web: Ontology-based knowledge Representation - Ontology
languages for the Semantic Web: Resource Description Framework - Web Ontology Language - Modelling
and aggregating social network data: State-of-the-art in network data representation - Ontological
representation of social individuals - Ontological representation of social relationships - Aggregating and
reasoning with social network data - Advanced representations.

Text Book:
Peter Mika, ―Social Networks and the Semantic Web‖, First Edition, Springer 2007

Part A

1.What are called ontologies?(K1)

Ontology is a formal naming and definition of the types, properties, and interrelationships of the entities that really or
fundamentally exist for a particulardomain of discourse.

2. Outline the benefits of matrix representation of social networks.(K2)

Social network analysis (SNA) is the process of investigating social structures through the use of network and graph
theories. It characterizes networked structures in terms of nodes (individual actors, people, or things within the
network) and the ties, edges, or links (relationships or interactions) that connect them.

3. List the high level properties that a layout must satisfy.(K1)

High-level design document or HLDD adds the necessary details to the current project description to represent a
suitable model for coding. This document includes a high-level architecture diagram depicting the structure of the
system, such as the database architecture, application architecture (layers), application flow (navigation), security
architecture and technology architecture.

4. What are the various layout algorithms?(K2)

 Circular Layout
 Hierarchical Layout
 Organic Layout
 Orthogonal Layout
 Tree Layout
 Radial Layout
 Series-parallel Layout

5. Explain node-link diagrams.(K2)

Node-link diagrams are not subject to well-established graphical conventions like those found in geographical maps.
The visualization should come with a cautionary text in the legend, stating that:
 Distances are not absolute but relative to local connections. In consequence, one should not compare two
graphical distances.
 The representation may be rotated in every direction so the top, bottom, left and right positions have no
particular meaning.
 Nodes at the center of the picture may not be central at all in the network.

6. Define proximity of nodes.(K1)

On the very detailed level (i.e., node level) of link analysis, we want to figure out the relationship between two nodes
on the graph, such as proximity, association, correlation and causality. For proximity, the goal is to measure the
closeness between two nodes.

7. Explain tree layout with an example.(K2)

The tree layouter family specializes in the layout of tree-structured graphs. The need to visualize directed or
undirected trees arises in many application areas,
e.g.
 Dataflow analysis
 Software engineering
 Network management
 Bioinformatics
Tree layout is provided in a number of different styles:
 Directed Tree Layout
 Balloon Tree Layout
 Horizontal/Vertical Tree Layout
 Compact Tree Layout

8. Define Force-directed and Energy-based layouts.(K1)

Force directed algorithms view the graph as a virtual physical system. The nodes of the graph are bodies of the
system. These bodies have forces acting on or between them. These forces are physics-based, and therefore have a
natural analogy, such as magnetic repulsion or gravitational attraction.

9. What are digital libraries?(K2)

A digital library is a special library with a focused collection of digital objects that can include text, visual material,
audio material, video material, stored as electronic media formats (as opposed to print, microform, or other media),
along with means for organizing, storing, and retrieving the files and media contained in the library collection.

10. What is a co-authorship network?(K1)

Co-authorship analysis is still widely used to understand and assess scientific
collaboration patterns. In co-authorship networks, nodes represent authors,
organizations or countries, which are connected when they share the authorship.

11.What is ROLAP?(K1)
ROLAP is a set of user interfaces and applications that give a relational database a dimensional flavour. ROLAP
stands for Relational Online Analytic Processing.

12. What is the need for End User Data Access tool?(K1)
End User Data Access tool is a client of the data warehouse. In a relational data warehouse, such a client maintains a
session with the presentation server, sending a stream of separate SQL requests to the server. Evevtually the end user
data access tool is done with the SQL session and turns around to present a screen of data or a report, a graph, or
some other higher form of analysis to the user. An end user data access tool can be as simple as an Ad Hoc query
tool or can be complex as a sophisticated data mining or modeling application.

13. What is meant by Ad Hoc query tool?(K1)

A specific kind of end user data access tool that invites the user to form their own queries by directly manipulating
relational tables and their joins. Ad Hoc query tools, as powerful as they are, can only be effectively used and
understood by about 10% of all the potential end users of a data warehouse.

14. Name some of the data mining applications?(K1)

 Data mining for Biomedical and DNA data analysis
 Data mining for Financial data analysis
 Data mining for the Retail industry
 Data mining for the Telecommunication industry

15. What are the various data mining functionalities?(K1)

The data mining functionalities are:
 Concept class description
 Association analysis
 Classification and prediction
 Cluster Analysis
 Outlier Analysis

16. Compare “supervised” from “unsupervised”.(K2)

In data mining during classification the class label of each training sample is provided, this type of training is called
supervised learning (i.e.) the learning of the model is supervised in that it is told to which class each training sample
belongs. Eg. Classification In unsupervised learning the class label of each training sample is not known and the
member or set of classes to be learned may not be known in advance. Eg.Clustering.

17. Why is data quality so important in a data warehouse environment?(K1)

Data quality is important in a data warehouse environment to facilitate decision-making. In order to support decision-
making, the stored data should provide information from a historical perspective and in a summarized manner.

18. How can data visualization help in decision-making?(K1)

Data visualization helps the analyst gain intuition about the data being observed. Visualization applications
frequently assist the analyst in selecting display formats, viewer perspective and data representation schemas that
faster deep intuitive understanding thus facilitating decision-making.

19. What do you mean by high performance data mining?(K1)

Data mining refers to extracting or mining knowledge. It involves an integration of techniques from multiple
disciplines like database technology, statistics, machine learning, neural networks, etc. When it involves techniques
from high performance computing it is referred as high performance data mining.

20. What are the various data mining issues?(K1)

 Knowledge Mining
 User interaction
 Performance
 Diversity in data types
Part B

1. Explain about Ontology a role in the Semantic Web.(K2)

2. Explain social impacts of data mining? (K2)
3. Summarize about State of Art in network data representation.(K2)
4. Outline about Aggregating and Reasoning with social Network Data.(K2)
5. Explain about ontological representation of social network. (K2)
6. Explain Multidimensional Database briefly? (K2)

Part C

1. Design a method for Modelling and aggregating of social network data. (K3)
2. Compare and Contrast the E/R, UML, XML and RDF/OWL languages. Identify Which one is more
efficient?Justify your answer. (K3)
UNIT III Extraction and Mining Communities in Web Social Networks
Extracting evolution of Web Community from a Series of Web Archive - Detecting communities in
social networks - Definition of community - Evaluating communities - Methods for community
detection and mining - Applications of community mining algorithms - Tools for detecting
communities social network infrastructures and communities - Decentralized online social networks
- Multi-Relational characterization of dynamic social network communities.
Text Book:
Peter Mika, ―Social Networks and the Semantic Web‖, First Edition, Springer 2007

Part A

1. Define Clique. (K1)

A clique in a graph is a maximal complete subgraph of three or more nodes, all of

which are adjacent to each other, and there are no other nodes that are also adjacent to all of

the members of the clique.

2. What is dendrogram? (K1)

Decompose data objects into a several levels of nested partitioning (tree of clusters) called a dendrogram.

3. What do you mean community detection? (K1)

Discovering groups in a network where individual’s group memberships are not explicitly given.

4. What is Web Community? (K1)

A web community is a web site (or group of web sites) where specific content or links are only available to
its members. A web community may take the form of a social network service, an Internet forum, a group
of blogs, or another kind of social software web application

5. How a Web Community does differ from a community of people? (K1)

An online community is a virtual community whose members interact with each other primarily via the
Internet. For many, online communities may feel like home, consisting of a “family of invisible friends. An
online community can act as an information system where members can post, comment on discussions,
give advice or collaborate. Commonly, people communicate through social networking sites, chat rooms,
forums, e-mail lists and discussion boards. People may also join online communities through video games,
blogs and virtual worlds.

6. What is FOAF? (K1)

FOAF is used for describing people profiles, their relationships and their activities online. FOAF aims to
create a linked information system about people, groups, companies and other kinds of thing. If people
publish information in FOAF document format, machines will be able to make use of that information.

7. What is decentralized online social network? (K1)

A decentralized online social network (DOSN) is a distributed system for social networking with no or
limited dependency on any dedicated central infrastructure

8. What is the use of Igraph tool? (K1)

igraph is a free software package for creating and manipulating undirected and directed graphs. It includes
implementations for classic graph theory problems like minimum spanning trees and network flow, and also
implements algorithms for some recent network analysis methods, like community structure search

9. Compare Communities and Social Networks.(K2)

Communities Social Networks

Communities are held together by some common Social Networks are held together by pre-
interests of a large group of people. Although there established interpersonal relationships
may be pre-existing interpersonal relationship between individuals. So you know everyone that is
between members of a community, it is not directly connected to you.
required. So new members usually do not know
most of the people in the community.
Any one person may be part of many communities. Each person has one social network. But a person
can have different social graphs depending on what
relationship we want to focus on
They have overlapping and nested structure They have a network structure.

10. What is dynamic social network? (K1)

Dynamic social networks are social networks that take into account changes over time. They not only model
relations between human beings in terms of interpersonal interactions, but also consider the evolution of these
relations, i.e. the way and the extent by which they change over time

11. What is mutual awareness? (K1)

Mutual awareness refers to a relationship developed through observable interactions between two people. We can
define mutual awareness computationally by contextual use of links in social media
12. How is Web community extracted? (K1)

The web community is extracted communities based on their dense bipartite pattern. Ranking significantly
improves the relevance of the extracted communities with the search topic. Instead of working on the
whole web graph, we work on a web domain, which we extract based on the topic specific search results.
Therefore, the resulted communities are highly related with the search topic.

13. What is meant by virtual community? (K1)

A virtual community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific social media, potentially
crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals. Some of the most
pervasive virtual communities are online communities operating under social networking services.

14. What is the purpose of evolution metrics? (K1)

A system of measurement is a collection of units of measurement and rules relating them to each other. Systems of
measurement have historically been important, regulated and defined for the purposes of science and commerce.
Systems of measurement in modern use include the metric system, the imperial system, and United States customary
units.

15. What attributes are used to represent how many URLs the focused community obtains or loses?
(K1)

HTML5 defines a menu, which is to be used to contain the primary navigation of a web site, be it a list of
links or a form element such as a search box. This is a good idea, as previous to this we would contain the
navigation block inside something like <div id = “navigation”>
16. Justify the statement “The Web is extremely dynamic”. (K1)

To facilitate this task we would appreciate that the largest amount of meta-data would be supplied along with the
contents, specially.

 the web site address(es). If there are several web sites, please group the contents belonging to each one of
them on a separate directory;
 the content addresses (URL). If you are providing a local copy of a site please maintain the original file
names. If you are supplying contents that you gathered from the web please provide their original URLs;
 the content dates. Supply the date when each content was published or saved. If you do not know the exact
dates, please supply approximate dates;
 the content media type (MIME). Please maintain the original file name extensions of the contents
(e.g. .gif, .html, .jpg). If possible, provide the full HTTP header for each content. It is particularly important
to provide the media type for contents dynamically generated that do not contain file name extensions.

17. What is spectral methods? (K1)

Spectral methods are a class of techniques used in applied mathematics and scientific computing to numerically
solve certain differential equations, often involving the use of the Fast Fourier Transform. The idea is to write the
solution of the differential equation as a sum of certain "basis functions" (for example, as a Fourier series which is a
sum of sinusoids) and then to choose the coefficients in the sum in order to satisfy the differential equation as well as
possible.

18. What is Markov Clustering? (K1)

The MCL algorithm is short for the Markov Cluster algorithm, a fast and scalable unsupervised cluster
algorithm for graphs (also known as networks) based on simulation f (stochastic) flow in graphs.

19. What is the objective of Kemighan-Lin (KL) algorithm?(K1)

Kemighan-Lin algorithm is about the heuristic algorithm for the graph partitioning problem. For a heuristic
for the travelling salesperson problem, see Lin-Kemighan heuristic. It is a heuristic algorithm for finding
partitions of graphs.

20. What is meant by modularity?(K1)

Modular programming is the process of subdividing a computer program into separate sub programs. A
module is a separate software component. It can often be used in a variety of applications and functions
with other components of the system.

21. What is a Dendrogram? (K1)

A dendrogram is a tree diagram frequently used to illustrate the arrangement of the clusters produced by
hierarchical clustering. Dendrograms are often used in computational biology to illustrate the clustering of
genes or samples, sometimes on top of heatmaps.

22. What is Girvan and Newman’s divisive algorithm? (K1)

The Girvan-Newman algorithm detects communities by progressively removing edges from the original
network. The connected components of the remaining network are the communities. Instead of trying to
construct a measure that tells us which edges are the most central to communities, the Girvan-Newman
algorithm focuses on edges that are most likely “between” communities.

23. What is multi-level graph partitioning? (K1)

The graph partition problem is defined on data represented in the form of a graph G=(V,E), with V vertices
and E edges, such that it is possible to partition G into smaller components with specific properties. For
instance, a k-way partition divides the vertex set into k smaller components. A good partition is defined as
one in which the number of edges running between separated components is small.

24. What is stochastic flow? (K1)

It is a known fact that solutions to a certain second order parabolic partial differential equation are
represented by means of a diffusion process or a stochastic flow.

25. What are heterogeneous social networks? (K1)

Community mining is one of the major directions in social network analysis. However, in reality, there
exist multiple, heterogeneous social networks, each representing a particular kind of relationship, and each
kind of relationship may play a distinct role in a particular task.

Part B

1. Explain in detail about web community. (K2)

2. Summarize about Community detection and mining. (K2)
3. Explain Decentralized Online Social Networks. (K2)
4. Explain the following methods of detecting communities: Divisive algorithms, Modularity Optimization,
Spectral algorithms (K2)
5. Outline Multirelational dynamic social networking. (K2)
6. Discuss the various evolution metrics (K2)
Part C

1. Explain how will you extract of web community from a series of web archives? (K2)
2. Explain the various tools for Detecting Communities Social Network Infrastructures and Communities.
(K2)

UNIT-IV:PREDICTING HUMAN BEHAVIOUR AND PRIVACY ISSUES

Understanding and predicting human behaviour for social communities - User data management - Inference
and Distribution - Enabling new human experiences - Reality mining - Context - Awareness - Privacy in
online social networks - Trust in online environment - Trust models based on subjective logic - Trust network
analysis - Trust transitivity analysis - Combining trust and reputation - Trust derivation based on trust
comparisons - Attack spectrum and countermeasures.

Text Book:
Peter Mika, ―Social Networks and the Semantic Web‖, First Edition, Springer 2007

Part A

1. What is meant by evolution in Social Networks?(K1)

Visual representation of social networks is important to understand the network data and convey the result
of the analysis. Signed graphs can be used to illustrate good and bad relationships between humans
location-based interaction analysis, social sharing and filtering, recommender systems development, and
link prediction and entity resolution.

2. What is stream paradigm of computation? (K1)

Stream processing is a computer programming paradigm, equivalent to dataflow programming, event
stream processing, and reactive programming, that allows some applications to more easily exploit a
limited form of parallel processing. Such applications can use multiple computational units, such as the
FPUs on a GPU or field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), without explicitly managing allocation,
synchronization, or communication among those units.

3. Give the purpose of stream mining algorithm. (K1)

A data stream is an ordered sequence of instances that in many applications of data stream mining can be
read only once or a small number of times using limited computing and storage capabilities. Examples of
data streams include computer network traffic, phone conversations, ATM transactions, web searches, and
sensor data. Data stream mining can be considered a subfield of data mining, machine learning, and
knowledge discovery.

4. What is the use of sliding window in stream mining? (K1)

Finding frequent patterns in a continuous stream of transactions is critical for many applications such as
retail market data analysis, network monitoring, web usage mining, and stock market prediction.

5. What are the two different threads of research on the analysis of dynamic social networks? (K1)
Social and temporal analysis methods.

6. List the characteristics of perennial objects? (K1)

An object is made of tangible material (the pen is made of plastic, metal, ink).
An object holds together as a single whole (the whole pen, not a fog).
An object has properties (the color of the pen, where it is, how thick it writes...).
An object can do things and can have things done to it.

7. How will you compute the entity similarity matrix? (K1)

The term "cosine similarity" is sometimes used to refer to different definition of similarity provided below.
However the most common use of "cosine similarity" is as defined above and the similarity and distance
metrics defined below are referred to as "angular similarity" and "angular distance" respectively. The
normalized angle between the vectors is a formal distance metric and can be calculated from the similarity
score defined above. This angular distance metric can then be used to compute a similarity function
bounded between 0 and 1, inclusive.

8. What is an Evolution Net? (K1)

A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors sets of dyadic ties. The study of these
structures uses social network analysis to identify local and global .The Barabási model of network
evolution shown above is an example of a scale-free network and criminology.

9. What are the challenging issues in (dynamic) probabilistic modeling? (K1)

Bayesian Networks assume a static model of the system which does not account for failure/repair dynamics
(i.e., the system state is assumed to be static during diagnosis process). In highly dynamic systems, this is
not the case. There is a need to expand a static Bayesian Network model into a dynamic Bayesian Network
model, in order to model situations where the node states change over time.

10. What are the two risk functions of non-parametric method? (K1)
Modelling the risk function non-parametrically, estimating it, for example, by a smoothing (thin plate)
spline is attractive as a more explorative approach. For prospective studies this amounts to smoothing
within the framework and distributional assumptions of generalized regression models (for binary
observations). Case-control studies as retrospective studies with exposure to risk factors being observed do
not immediately fit into this setting.

11. What is meant by social influence? (K1)

Social influence occurs when one's emotions, opinions, or behaviors are affected by others. Social
influence takes many forms and can be seen in conformity, socialization, peer pressure, obedience,
leadership, persuasion, sales and marketing.

12. What is meant by social correlation? (K1)

The correlation is one of the most common and most useful statistics. A correlation is a single number that
describes the degree of relationship between two variables. Let's work through an example to show you
how this statistic is computed.

13. What is meant by triadic closure? (K1)

Triadic closure is the property among three nodes A, B, and C, such that if a strong tie exists between A-B
and A-C, there is a weak or strong tie between B-C.

14. What is node-based centrality? (K1)

A star network with 5 nodes and 4 edges. Based on these three features, Freeman (1978) formalized three
different measures of node centrality: degree, closeness, and betweenness. Degree is the number of nodes
that a focal node is connected to, and measures the involvement of the node in the network.

15. What is meant by katz centrality? (K1)

Katz centrality of a node is a measure of centrality in a network. It was introduced by Leo Katz in 1953 and
is used to measure the relative degree of influence of an actor (or node) within a social network. Unlike
typical centrality measures which consider only the shortest path (the geodesic) between a pair of actors,
Katz centrality measures influence by taking into account the total number of walks between a pair of
actors.

16. What is social action tracking? (K1)

Event tracking measures general user-interactions very well, Social Analytics provides a consistent
framework for recording social interactions. This in turn provides a consistent set of reports to compare
social network interactions across multiple networks.

17. What is meant byLatent action state? (K1)

Latent functions are the unintended, unpredicted or unseen consequences that might arise as a result of
certain manifest functions that have taken place.

18. What is meant bygrouping behavior? (K1)

A group can be defined as two or more interacting and interdependent individuals who come together to
achieve particular objectives. A group behavior can be stated as a course of action a group takes as a
family. For example: Strike.

19. What is meant by diffusion influence model? (K1)

A diffusion model attempts to replicate the temporal adoption of a new product as word of mouth travels
through the target population and external communications attempt to influence demand. A sample
diffusion model worksheet with a graph of projected adoption appears below. Click on sections of the
image to link to explanations of its contents.

20. State Expert location problem. (K1)

Human expertise is more valuable than capital, means of production or intellectual property. Contrary to
expertise, all other aspects of capitalism are now relatively generic: access to capital is global, as is access
to means of production for many areas of manufacturing. Intellectual property can be similarly licensed.
Furthermore, expertise finding is also a key aspect of institutional memory, as without its experts an
institution is effectively decapitated. However, finding and “licensing” expertise, the key to the effective
use of these resources, remain much harder, starting with the very first step: finding expertise that you can
trust.

Part B

1. Illustrate the challenges of social network streams. (K2)

2. Explain briefly social similarity and influence. (K2)
3. Describe influence maximization in viral marketing. (K2)
4. Explain expert location with score propagation and graph constraints. (K2)
5. Explain in detail Bayesian probabilistic models. (K2)
6. Describe feature based link prediction. (K2)

Part C
1. Develop the four dimensions that are associated to knowledge discovery in social networks and
elaborate on their interplay in the context of evolution. (K3)
2. Identify how communities evolve into the learning process as smoothly evolving constellation of
interacting entities (K3)