by Cecilia Mascolo (University of Cambridge, UK)

 

 

In this talk I will introduce generally our work on new metrics to analyze location based social networks, giving examples from our analysis of Gowalla, Twitter, Foursquare and Brightkite. I will also discuss application of these metrics which include friendship prediction and content delivery network improvement. In particular I will discuss our study of geo-social cascades on Twitter data and how this can be used to improve content delivery network caching: more and more, the diffusion of this content happens on online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, where social cascades can be observed when users increasingly re-post links they have received from others.

 

We will describe how geographic information extracted from social cascades can be exploited to improve caching of multimedia files in a Content Delivery Network. We take advantage of the fact that social cascades can propagate in a geographically limited area to discern whether an item is spreading locally or globally. This informs cache replacement policies, which utilize this information to ensure that content relevant to a cascade is kept close to the users who may be interested in it.