Download DO&IT Seminar Series incentives

DO&IT Seminar Series
http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/doit/events/seminars.aspx
Speaker:
Elena Zheleva, Lead Data Scientist at LivingSocial
Date:
Monday, February 4, 2013
Time:
11-12:15 pm
Location:
Room 2515
Title:
Analytics in a personalized online world: complex networks and
incentives
Abstract: With the proliferation of online social media in recent years, there has been an
increasing interest in studying social phenomena at a larger scale than it was ever possible before.
Many companies have started to create social media strategies to keep up with the buzz around online
social networks. These strategies consider how to increase the companies’ digital presence and how
to positively impact the adoption of their products and services. Sometimes, they offer monetary
incentives to customers for sharing with their social circles, thus increasing the volume of shares and
changing the expected behavior of users. The space of possible incentives is very large, and their
effect is often hard to predict. In this talk, we will present an incentivization scenario in which users
adopt a product and get rewarded for convincing a certain number of friends to adopt the same
product. We discover how the incentive changes the structural properties of the social network, and
we distinguish between altruistic and incentivized shares. To optimize social sharing, we propose a
novel graph model, which captures the incentivized sharing behavior of users at an e-commerce
company and enables decision-making under different hypothetical incentive scenarios.
Bio: Elena Zheleva has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland College Park.
Her research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning, data mining, and computational
social sciences, especially in developing computational methods to infer hidden characteristics and
relationships from online social networks. She is also interested in the related problems of
maintaining anonymity and privacy arising in online social media. She has published her research on
these topics in a number of top-tier peer-reviewed venues, such as KDD, WWW and TOIS, as well as
an invited book chapter and a synthesis lecture. She is currently the lead data scientist at
LivingSocial. More information about Elena’s research and publications is available at
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~elena
Van Munching Hall ▫ Room 4306 ▫ Telephone 301-405-8654
College Park, MD ▫ University of Maryland