Title: Characterising Virality on Twitter
Speaker: Amitabha Bagchi
Abstract:
The emergence of online social networks and, with them, the phenomenon
of "virality" wherein certain themes or pieces of content (or memes as
they are known) spread explosively through the network, has attracted a
lot of attention from computer science researchers in the last few
years. The central problem in this area can be posed as a simple
question: Can we predict which meme will go viral before it has actually
gone viral? We began studying this problem by trying to identify metrics
that discriminate between viral and non-viral topics and followed up by
trying to actually solve the prediction problem. In this talk we will
present some of the challenges that we encountered along the way and
some of the results we obtained.