Online Social Networks

Online social networks have revolutionized the way we interact and share information over the Internet, and social networking applications such as YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, etc., have millions of active users. While already being enormously popular, these applications only scratch the surface of online social networking possibilities. The goal of this research project is to investigate and find new and creative ways of how to make use of social networking applications to enrich people's everyday lives. Answering this question poses challenging and fascinating research problems that require both creativity and rigorous mathematical analysis. As part of the project, we are developing novel mathematical models of how online social networks are formed, and are trying to find creative ways to use the resulting network topologies to efficiently share/distribute information. While our work focuses on online social networks, our models and results also provide surprising insights into how and why the social networks that we form and use in our everyday life are so important and efficient.