Jonathan spoke at Social Network Analysis Forum of CUC

Jonathan spoke at Social Network Analysis Forum of CUC

Jonathan Zhu gave a keynote speech at the Forum on Social Network Analysis and Communication Research Methods, organized by Communication University of China (CUC) in Beijing on May 27. He talked about sampling methods for social media data, focusing on how to draw probability samples from social media sites with publically visible numeric user IDs and how to draw snowball samples from social networking sites with traceable URLs to friends. To illustrate both approaches, he reported findings from two recent studies of his Web Mining Lab, one used random digit search (RDS) to generate probability samples and another used popular-alters driven sampling (PADS) to reduce biasedness in snowballing samples.

Over 200 faculty members, students, industry, and other users of social network analysis from different cities of China attended the forum. Other speakers at the Forum include complex networks scholars (Xiaofan Wang of Shanghai Jiaotong University and Jinqing Fang of Chinese Academy of Science) and social media executives (Ning Wan of Financial Value Magazine, Richard Zong of Sina Media Research Institute, etc.).