On the quality of inferring interests from social neighbors

This paper intends to provide some insights of a scientific problem: how likely one’s interests can be inferred from his/her social connections – friends, friends’ friends, 3-degree friends, etc? Is“Birds of a Feather Flocks Together”a norm? We do not consider the friending activity on online social networking sites. Instead, we conduct this study by implementing a privacy-preserving large distribute social sensor system in a large global IT company to capture the multifaceted activities of 30,000+ people, including communications (e.g., emails, instant messaging, etc) and Web 2.0 activities (e.g., social bookmarking, file sharing, blogging, etc). These activities occupy the majority of employees’ time in work, and thus, provide a high quality approximation to the real social connections of employees in the workplace context. In addition to such “informal networks”, we investigated the “formal networks”, such as their hierarchical structure, as well as the demogr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: KDD
• Authors: Zhen Wen, Ching-Yung Lin
• Keywords: Data Mining, Inference Quality, KDD 2010, Social Connections, Web 2.0 Activities