EAGER: Interactive Visualization and Modeling of Latent Communities

University Of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

In many areas of professional and social life, people form communities based on some obvious feature, so that members tend to be similar in some aspect of interest or behavior. However, as the number of groups expands, new dimensions of similarity are introduced. This project will focus on the ways to understand many different communities that differ in many dimensions and to present that understanding in ways that help to understand the community structure. The modern web provides a number of alternative data sources for discover communities, with activities ranging from blog comments to tagging of resources. This data can be used to discover and model communities reliably and present the complex data in clear and efficient ways that decision makers and other stakeholders can readily understand. The visualization of the complex data will also be interactive, permitting exploration of the data. The knowledge of the existence of these communities can be used to support recommendation approaches, such as identification of mentors or development of wide scientific collaborations.