CSCC46: Social and Information Networks

Fall 2025

Lecture hours: Monday 3-5pm in HW 214
Tutorial 1 hours: Monday 12-1pm in IA 3050
Tutorial 2 hours: Monday 1-2pm in IA 2160

Instructor: Ashton Anderson, Associate Professor
Email: ashton@cs.toronto.edu
Office hours: Monday 2-3pm

TA: Kai Xie, ky.xie@mail.utoronto.ca

Course News

Course Description

A course on how networks underlie the social, technological, and natural worlds, with an emphasis on developing intuitions for broadly applicable concepts in network analysis. Topics include: introductions to graph theory, network concepts, and game theory; social networks; information networks; the aggregate behaviour of markets and crowds; network dynamics; information diffusion; popular concepts such as "six degrees of separation", the "friendship paradox", and the "wisdom of crowds".

Important links:

Lectures

Week Date Topic Reading Assignments Materials
1 9/8 Course overview; Introduction to graph theory; The Web as a Network Ch. 1, 2.1-2.4 Sign up for MarkUs, Quercus, Discord [Slides]
2 9/15 Network Representations; Gnp Ch. 4.1-4.3, 13.1-13.4 [Slides]
3 9/22 Strong and Weak Ties; Community Detection; Homophily Ch. 3.1-3.4, 3.6 A1 out [Slides]
4 9/29 Signed Networks; Structural Balance Ch. 5.1-5.5 [Slides][Video]
5 10/6 Six Degrees; Decentralized Search Ch. 20.1-20.7 A1 due
6 10/20 Midterm
7 11/3 Link Analysis; PageRank Ch. 14.1-14.6
8 11/10 Game Theory Ch. 6.1-6.8
9 11/17 Congestion; Decision Cascades Ch. 8.1-8.3, 19.1-19.7
10 11/24 Information Cascades Ch. 16.1-16.7
11 12/1 Contagion; Epidemics Ch. 21.1-8


Assignments

Assignments are posted on Quercus. Assignment submissions are through MarkUs. See the syllabus details (below) for detailed information about grading, late assignments, and the collaboration policy.

Syllabus Details

Prerequisites

Material

Assignment Rules

Final exam
Details about the final exam will be provided later in the term.

Evaluation

Acknowledgments

This course is based on similar offerings by Jure Leskovec, Jon Kleinberg, and Johan Ugander. Many thanks to them for their help.