I have worked on multiple projects including designing a novel media sharing application, detecting patterns in large scale Twitter feeds, and analyzing community behavior in social media to design mechanisms to ‘nudge’ people into suitable behaviors.

a) Patterns in Twitter Data

Studied a corpus of 6 Million tweets to detect various user community patterns. We noticed 80-20 power laws, and spatio-temporal laws (e.g. Zipf, Richter) across different topics in Twitter data.
Details here.

PowerLaws

b) Mechanism Design for Incentivizing Social Media Contributions (Best Paper – WSM 2009)

Created a Game theoretic model of user behavior on social media sites. The model can estimate the optimal contribution
strategy for each rational user, resultant community behavior, and allows the system designer to exploit the selfishness of end
users to design incentive mechanisms which will optimize system performance while still benefiting the users. Details here.

c) Shared Media Reliving

Designed and developed a system which allows each user to have a personalized reliving
experience from media collections shared over social networks. The system creates audio-visual shows which are
aesthetically pleasing, yet interactive and semantically drivable based on people, locations, time, and events discovered in the
media collection; thus allowing each user to relive experiences from their own perspective. Details here.

smartshare