Theoretical foundations of online social networks

在线社交网络已经彻底改变了我们在互联网上互动和分享信息的方式，而YouTube、Flickr、MySpace、Facebook等社交网络应用程序，拥有数百万活跃用户。虽然已经非常流行，但我们目前对在线社交网络的正式了解非常有限。本研究项目的目标是填补这一空白，努力为在线社交网络的理解和算法设计的理论基础。该项目的两个主要主题将是提供在线社交网络如何形成的数学模型和结果，以及我们如何使用对在线社交网络的拓扑结构和特征的理解来设计有效的算法和协议，用于内容搜索，共享和分发。下面我们提供一个简短的

Online social networks have revolutionized the way we interact and share information over the Internet, and social networking applications such as YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, etc., have millions of active users. While already being enormously popular, we currently have a very limited formal understanding of online social networks. The goal of this research project to fill in this gap by working towards a theoretical foundation for the understanding and algorithm design for online social networks. The two main topics of the project will be on providing a mathematical models and results on how online social networks are formed, and on how we can use the understanding of the topologies and characteristics of online social networks to design efficient algorithms and protocols for content search, sharing, and distribution. Below we provide a brief