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School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science

Prof Sue Bok Moon, KAIST, Korea

16 January 2013

Time: 3:00 - 4:00pm
Venue: BR 3.02 Bancroft Road Teaching Rooms Peter Landin Building London E1 4NS

A study of Twitter unfollow behavior

A study of Twitter unfollow behavior

Unfollow in Twitter offers a unique opportunity to researchers to study the dissolution of relationship.  We began our study of Twitter unfollow behavior with daily snapshots of follow relationship of 1.2 million Korean-speaking users for 51 days and their all tweets. From our initial analysis, we confirm that unfollow is prevalent and irrelevant to the volume of interaction. We find that other factors such as link reciprocity, tweet burstiness and informativeness are crucial for unfollow decision.  We conduct interview with 22 users to supplement the results and figure out motivations behind unfollow behavior. Then we use a multiple logistic regression model to analyze the impacts of the structural and interactional properties on unfollow in Twitter. Our model with 42 dependent variables demonstrates that both structural and interactional properties are important to explain the unfollow behavior. For the last part of the study we relax the inter-link independence assumption and present preliminary results from the p*/ERGM model.  We will conclude the talk with an overview of other related works at the KAIST AN research lab.

Biography: Sue Moon received her B.S. and M.S. from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1988 and 1990, respectively, all in computer engineering.  She received a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2000. From 1999 to 2003, she worked in the IPMON project at Sprint ATL in Burlingame, California. In August of 2003, she joined KAIST and now teaches in Daejeon, Korea. She is serving as TPC co-chair for WWW 2013 and as vice chair for WWW 2014. She is currently serving as associate editor for Network Science.  She won the best paper award in ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement
Conference 2007, has been awarded the Amore Pacific Woman Scientist Award in 2009 and the Young Engineer’s Award by the National Academy of Engineering of Korea in 2012.  She has been named for KAIST endowed professorship for 2011-2013. Her research interests are: online social networks and networked systems.

This seminar is hosted by Hamed Haddadi hamed@eecs.qmul.ac.uk

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