COL 865: Special Topics in Computer Applications - Social Computing

Class timing

Holi Semester 2021
Tuesday and Friday: 2 - 3:30 PM (Slot AC)

Tentative course content

  1. Social network analysis
    • Introduction, applications and challenges
    • Structural properties of large social networks
    • Measures of network centrality
    • Identifying popular users/experts
    • Community detection algorithms
    • Information diffusion models
    • Influence maximization
    • Link prediction
  2. Fundamentals of social data analytics
    • Measurement and collection of social media data
    • Basics of text processing over social data
    • Entity linking and entity resolution
    • Topic models
  3. Social search and recommendation algorithms
  4. Crowdsourcing
  5. Harmful users/content on social media -- hate speech, fake news, spammers in social networks, etc.
  6. Different types of social platforms -- Anonymous social networks, E-commerce sites
  7. Basics of computational social choice — voting, allocation
  8. Social media and digital health

Pre-requisites for the course

  • Data structures and algorithms
  • Basics of Machine Learning
  • The course will involve understanding of several research papers, and every student will have to present at least one research paper in the class.
  • There will be a few programming assignments as well.

Course evaluation

  • Minor and major exams: 30% + 30%
  • Programming assignments: 15%
  • Paper presentation and critique: 25%
Note: The evaluation plan is subject to change based on institute/department policies and other related factors.