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Browsing by Author "Ahmad, Muhammad Aurangzeb"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Computational trust in Multiplayer Online Games.
    (2012-04) Ahmad, Muhammad Aurangzeb
    Trust is a ubiquitous phenomenon in human societies. Computational trust refers to the mediation of trust via a computational infrastructure. It has been studied in a variety of contexts e.g., peer-to-peer systems, multi-agent systems, recommendation systems etc. While this is an active area of research, the types of questions that have been explored in this field has been limited mainly because of limitations in the types of datasets which are available to researchers. In this thesis questions related to trust in complex social environments represented by Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are explored. The main emphasis is that trust is a multi-level phenomenon both in terms of how it operates at multiple levels of network granularities and how trust relates to other social phenomenon like homophily, expertise, mentoring, clandestine behaviors etc. Social contexts and social environments affect not just the qualitative aspects of trust but this phenomenon is also manifested with respect to the network and structural signatures of trust network. Additionally trust is also explored in the context of predictive tasks: Previously described prediction tasks like link prediction are studied in the context of trust within the context of the link prediction family of problems: Link formation, link breakage, change in links etc. Additionally we define and explore new trust-related prediction problems i.e., trust propensity prediction, trust prediction across networks which can be generalized to the inter-network link prediction problem and success prediction based on using network measures of a person's social capital as a proxy.
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    Modeling Trust in Online Social Networks to Improve Adolescent Health Behavior
    (2010-08-18) Kim, Young Ae; Eisenberg, Marla E.; Ahmad, Muhammad Aurangzeb; Srivastava, Jaideep
    One of the major public health findings in recent years has been the discovery of the strong impact of an individual's social network on the individual's health as well as habits. A number of studies have shown that physical health factors such as obesity, emotional health factors such as happiness, and habits such as smoking and exercise are significantly impacted by the individual's social network. Based on this, there has been increasing interest in the application of network theory and system dynamics to the study of public health. Among a range of public health issues, adolescent health is particularly important for a number of reasons. First, given their developmental stage, adolescents are particularly sensitive to, and impacted by, their social networks. Second, many lifelong health habits or risk behaviors are established during adolescence (e.g. cigarette smoking, alcohol use). Third, adolescents represent the future workforce of the nation, thus their long-term health is critically important for the economy. This makes it especially important to study the impact of social networks on adolescent health. While the invention of the Internet, Web, mobile phones and personal digital assistants have revolutionized many walks of life, the most relevant to our present discussion is the creation of various online social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter). These sites allow new forms of person-to-person interactions, with negligible cost, low latency, and high bandwidth; with the overall effect being one of dramatically increasing the intensity and continuity of communication between people. Many end up spending more attention on online social networks, often at the expense of face-to-face interaction. While this 'attention displacement' from the physical world to the online world potentially raises interesting socio-psychological questions on its own, the fact that the online world is having a significant impact on our lives is unquestioned. Given that usage of online social networking sites is growing at a very rapid rate among adolescents, essentially having become a de facto socialization mechanism in this age group, its impact on adolescent health is expected to be commensurately high, and thus a correspondingly important area of inquiry. While on the one hand the new information and communication technologies have created the tools for new means (and kinds) of socialization, as a complement, the tremendous data collection abilities of these very same technologies provide a perfect opportunity to study these socializations at a granularity which was previously unimaginable. Use of advanced computational methods to analyze detailed behavioral data is bringing about a revolution in the way social science questions can be studied, and has led to the rapid emergence of the discipline of computational social science. ...
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    Towards the Analysis of Narrative Networks
    (2013-05-23) Ahmad, Muhammad Aurangzeb
    The literature on social networks has explored a large number of classes of human networks e.g., citation networks, online social networks, co-authorship networks, event networks, co-location networks, genealogy networks etc. The coverage of networks in the literature is however not uniform, one such neglected area is narrative networks. These networks constitute a class of networks which are formed by chains of narrations from one person to another person, these networks can even span generations. One of the reasons that the field has been neglected is because of the lack of datasets for analysis. In this paper an outline for the network science of narrative networks is given and a historical narrative network is constructed from a 9th century Middle Eastern source book. This network is used for network analysis and to illustrate the major problems in this field and lastly a set of research questions are proposed that should be addressed by researchers.