ODCSSS 2006 Quote

“In previous academic areas challenges have proved trivial and in bluntness, googleable. I enjoyed working in new fields that I did not understand while creating new solutions for unique problems. I also enjoyed having a tangible project complete to demonstrate.”

-ODCSSS 2006 Student

Visualization of the connectedness between people in order to help maintain a good social network

People are connected to each other in different ways, for example as family members, colleagues, etc. Technology has introduced new ways of being connected to people. Web sites like facebook.com or bebo.com allow people to be connected and communicate. Those people do not necessarily have to know each other really well or to physically see each other from time to time. It gets then really easy to be part of different groups of people, theses groups being sometimes quite big. Such a group of people is called a Social Network.

Understanding social networks is important since it can help determine for example if some people represent links between groups of people or if they are the ones connected to most people of a group. It appears interesting to be able to determine who are such people and get connected to them, improving individual connection to the network.

Considering web sites like facebook.com or bebo.com, one interesting problem is to offer the user a feature allowing visualizing the networks they are involved in (who are they connected to and who are connected to the people they are connected to?). Such a feature will help the user decide for example which people they are not connected yet to but it would be worth to be. Significantly augmenting the network the people are involved could then be done with few efforts.

One problem with such an approach is that it encourages the people to get connected to more and more people. Increasing the number of people of a group unfortunately reduces the individual interaction between people. It gets in particular more and more difficult to maintain a good connectivity with all the members of the network, even very close friends for example.

We propose here to address these problems by defining a visual representation of the network. This representation is modeled as a graph containing information that would help the user maintaining a good level of connectivity with as many people as possible. This could be done enhancing for example the strength of the connectivity between the members of the network as well as on which people the attention should be paid to at each moment. Other points can be taken into account so such a graphical representation is a useful tool to manage connectedness between lots of people.

Supervisors and Mentors:
Dr. Benoit Gaudin