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Computer Science Seminar
February 6, 2018 at 3 pm in 1225 Patrick F. Taylor Hall
Speaker: Dongwon Lee, Penn State University
Title: Likes-R-Us: Understanding and Protecting Likes in Social Media
Abstract: The recent dramatic increase in the usage and prevalence of social media has led
to the creation and sharing of a significant amount of information in various formats.
When it comes to information consumption, people are not only accessing and appreciating
published and shared contents, but also interacting with them by adding comments or
pressing a Like button (or expressing other relationships similar to Like in nature
such as “+1” in Google+, “re-pin” in Pinterest, and “favorite” in Flickr). As one
of popular activities in social media, in particular, pressing a Like button toward
published contents can be interpreted as an indication of one's shared interests to
the contents or the original posters. Therefore, such Like activities form relationships
and networks among people, raising interesting questions about their unique characteristics
and implications. In this talk, I will present some of recent findings from the "Likes-R-Us"
project (https://goo.gl/vsLt2h) at Penn State, identifying novel relationships from
Like activities, understanding different age groups better through the lens of Likes,
and uncovering fake Likes to maintain healthy eco systems.
Bio: Dongwon Lee is an associate professor in the College of Information Sciences and
Technology (a.k.a. iSchool) of The Pennsylvania State University, USA. From 2014 to
2016, he has also served as a program director at National Science Foundation (NSF),
co-managing cybersecurity programs such as SFS and SaTC with the yearly budget of
$50M. He researches broadly in Data Science, in particular, on the management of and
mining in data in diverse forms including structured records, text, multimedia, social
media, and Web. He obtained his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from Korea University, Columbia
University, and UCLA, respectively, all in Computer Science. Further details of his
research can be found at: http://pike.psu.edu/