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                              DATABASE SEMINAR
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                             Denilson Barbosa
                    University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
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  An Environment for Building, Exploring and Querying Social Networks
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                       Wednesday June 30, 2010 h 15:00
                              **** Aula N3 ****
                    Dipartimento di Informatica e Automazione
                            Universita' Roma Tre
                             Via Vasca Navale, 79
                                  piano terra
  Come arrivare:  http://atzeni.dia.uniroma3.it/accesso/index.html

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                                    ABSTRACT

Social network analysis aims at uncovering and understanding the structures
and patterns resulting from social inter- actions among individuals and
organizations engaged in a common activity. Since the early days of the field,
networks are modeled as graphs modeling social actors and the relations
between them. The field has become very active with the maturity of
computational machinery to handle large-scale graphs, and, more recently, the
automated gathering of social data. This talk will describe ReaSoN: an ongoing
work towards building a system for extracting, visualizing and exploring
social networks. The talk will focus on the underlying infrastructure behind
ReaSoN, the extraction of social networks from structured citation databases
as well as unstructured social media, some data management issues that arise
in building such systems, notions of network visibility and the processing of
user- defined queries.

As an illustration, the talk covers the first incarnation of ReaSoN: a social
network resulting from academic research built from ACM DL, DBLP and Google
Scholar data. In doing so, ReaSoN contributes to the understanding as well as
fostering of the social networks underlying research.

Bio:

Denilson Barbosa is a faculty member at the University of Alberta, in
Edmonton, Canada. He received a PhD from the University of Toronto in 2005.
His research interests are in databases and the Web, and he has worked on the
storage, update, and consistency checking of XML data, as well as in mappings
between disparate data formats. Denilson is the recipient of the Alberta
Ingenuity Fund New Faculty Award, and an IBM faculty award.



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