Abstract:
Social networking sites make it easy for users to connect with, follow, or "like" each other. Such a mechanism promotes positive connections and helps a social networking site to grow without direct belligerent or negative encounters. This type of one-way connections makes no distinction between indifference and dislike; in other words, two users have only, by default, positive connections. However, it is apparent that as one's network grows, some users might not be benevolent toward each other, or negative links could form, though not explicitly stated. In this talk, I assess the need for discovering such hidden negative links, explore ways of finding negative links, and show the significance of negative links in social media applications.

Biography:
Jiliang Tang is a research scientist at Yahoo Labs. He received his Ph.D. of Computer Science at Arizona State University in 2014, and B.S./M.S. from Beijing Institute of Technology in 2008 and 2010, respectively. His research interests including trust/distrust computing, signed network analysis, feature selection, recommender systems, social computing, and data mining for social goods. He was awarded the Runner Up of SIGKDD Dissertation Award 2015, Dean's Dissertation Award 2015, Outstanding Graduating PhD Student 2015, the ASU President's Award for Innovation 2014, Best Paper Shortlist in WSDM13, and the 3rd Place in Nokia Mobile Data Challenge 2012. He is the poster chair of SIGKDD2016 and serves as regular journal reviewers and numerous conference program committees. He co-presented three tutorials in KDD2014, WWW2014, and Recsys2014, and has published more than 70 innovative works in highly ranked journals and top conference proceedings.

Host:
Dr. Alex Liu