And before you ask– No, it’s not because Zuckerburg reads through all your online conversations. In 2013, a Cornell University alumni Lars Backstrom (who has worked at Facebook since 2009, helped create the “People You May Know” feature, and is currently the VP of Engineering) and professor Jon Kleinberg published a paper titled: “Romantic Partnerships […]
Month: October 2022
Motivation Many of us at the moment are nearing or in our last year of university. Now we must consider the problem at hand of figuring out what to do next; it can be pursuing further education, but most of us will likely be trying to seek full-time work. With the recession and more competition […]
Introduction: One amazing thing about Canada is we have the opportunity to experience the change of seasons in what most people consider their most prolific states. The flora blossoming in spring, the warm and sunny summers, the falling autumn leaves, and the snowfall of winter. To us, Climate Change could just be the loss of […]
Introduction What is the most popular topic these years? I would say it’s COVID-19. COVID-19 is the largest pandemic in recent years, it has worldwide effects on the economy, health and many other fields in the most countries in this globe. We also had a pandemic event(Corrupted Blood) in the online game World of Warcraft […]
Social media has become more and more prevalent as our lives become more digitalized, and subsequently online discourse has become integral in important topics like sentiment of public/political figures, consequential health (mis)information spread, and ethics debates. Online discourse can become a helpful tool to spread ideas, facilitate debates and raise awareness, but it can also […]
Introduction: Everyday, I, along with millions of other, take the subway on my way to work and school. The total global number of people whose use the subway is expected to continue to increase as the world recovers from Covid and the overall world population continues to increase. Because so many people are depend on […]
As we mentioned in lecture, Granovetter defined strong ties between people as friends, and weak ties as acquaintance. Acquaintances often brings new opportunities to people rather than close friends. We know that neighborhood based close networks were limited in getting new information, so that these strong ties help less on job hunting. In contrast, the […]
Introduction Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries in the world have implemented different policies to contain the spread of the virus, including mask and vaccine mandates, travel restrictions, and mandatory quarantine. Fast forward to today, with the development of vaccines and treatments and the lowering of hospitalization and death rates, coupled with the […]
Motivation Imagine a UTSC student S. He loves computers, he loves them so much to the point that he wants to take every single computer science course available at UTSC. He wants them done as soon as possible so that he could get his diploma quickly and move on. Suppose he has infinite brain power […]
What is Bitcoin and how do we define trust? Bitcoin, anonymously created by Satoshi Nakamoto, is a technological software network of nodes which enable the transference and velocity of coins called bitcoins via clever usage of double SHA256 cryptography and a network consensus mechanism known as Proof of Work. Being decentralized and supposedly trust-less in […]
Introduction: Have you ever wondered how companies, like LinkedIn, test new features to their platform before releasing them for the public? Does this new feature correctly perform the task it is made to do? How do they know if people would like this new feature over other features? At LinkedIn, most of these questions […]
Introduction and Motivation The first ever wristwatch was said to have been made over two centuries ago in 1810. Over these past couple of centuries, the purpose of watches has changed dramatically. They started off as a tool for militaries that made it easier for everyone to coordinate strategic moves accurately, with the wristwatch being […]
Our cities are shaped by our public transit systems, our work is shaped by our transit system, our leisure activities are shaped by our public transit system and yet, they are far from perfect. Even though its funny to think of public transit in this way, this isn’t an exaggeration as cities are ever so […]
Introduction Understanding different distributions of the galaxies in the known universe in terms of graph theory can open opportunities to discover a vast number of different facts and new information about the universe. Looking at information we already know such as constellation graphs, we can get an idea of the distances and edge weights of […]
The Covid-19 pandemic hit the world, took many lives and had devastating effects on the words economy. While organizations scrambled to prepare the vaccine, countries imposed lockdowns and quarantines on citizens to prevent the spread of the virus. Covid-19 is a highly communicable virus, so it would very rapidly spread across communities and groups. Governments […]
Crowded Streets With a population of almost 2.8 million in the city, not even accounting for those that commute daily for work, Toronto has to move a lot of people through a small space, fast. Car traffic through the city is slow at the best of times, and with alternative transportation becoming increasingly popular, models […]
Anyone that considers themselves a football/soccer fan knows just how legendary Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona team really was. With their Tiki-Taka style of football and top caliber players such as Leo Messi, Ronaldinho, Xavi, and Iniesta, they absolutely steamrolled the competition. Within this blog post I will use network science to analyze this Barcelona team. Within […]
Introduction “Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for”. These words uttered by Robin Williams in 1989’s Dead Poets Society are remembered by many as one of his greatest quotes. It is the message carried by his words […]
Introductions: It’s quite rare to be able to see the growth of new platforms on the internet, as they usually only reach the public eye once they have become incompressible big. a rare instance of this for me is Twitch.tv, a streaming platform that’s primarily aimed towards gamers. Since its creation in 2011 it […]
MotivationOne of the words that best describes me is curious. Although at first, I did not know about this trait of mine, I found out later when everyone around me described me so when doing a social activity. I have always been interested in pretty much everything from how mathematical models work, how computer work, […]
Motivations Many of the network diagrams I see online or in CSCD27 all look very similar, essentially a graph with computers as its nodes and connections as its edges. This led to me searching for applications of graph theory in network security and I found many using graph algorithms that we learned in this and […]
Introduction As we have covered in lecture, signed networks are networks that consist of positive and negative relationships (i.e. nodes connected to one another with edges a positive or negative value). And we say that a set of edges and nodes that form a triangle is balanced if it has one or three positive edges, […]
I am an avid YouTube Music supporter. I truly believe that it is a better experience on laptop than Spotify. But I’ve always wondered how does it’s recommendation algorithm work? Like YouTube, whenever you click on a song (or a playlist) on YouTube Music it will play that song/playlist and populate the sidebar with other […]
Introduction Homophily, as we learned in the course, is a concept which states that similar individuals tend to stick together and act in similar ways (“birds of a feather flock together”). While making friends in person could be driven by homophily (age, gender, etc.), making connections with people online, whom we have never met is […]
In recent news, Elon Musk has been forced to buy Twitter after backing out of the 44-billion-dollar deal after claims that the number of bots on the platform were “wildly higher” than the 5% estimate Twitter had disclosed publicly. In fact, Musk claimed that in the past at least 20% of Twitter accounts were bots. […]
Introduction Do you have the impression that students who have high academic performances usually have a fixed social circle, and their friends are more likely to have good academic scores? To be honest, I have got such impression all the time. After I learned the knowledge about network communities in the lecture, I found the […]
Introduction When we eat out, we will often times look for reviews online on websites ranging from just Google or perhaps Yelp and the like. Indeed, Yelp being one of the largest platforms for reviews means that the public dataset that they released is particularly useful — especially when we consider what is possible here. […]
Motivation War is something that has always been a part of human history whether we like it or not. The human race collectively has been known to resort to it to resolve disputes over resources, ideologies, and other differences. Depending on how out of hand these disputes become, the size of these wars can range […]
Introduction In lecture we discussed ideas of SCC and clusters or components which seem more “connected”. We learned about Mark Granovetter’s work on modelling a graph using strong and weak ties, and implications of this in our graphs. In this paper we will discuss the existence of global factions and overall “connectedness” of these factions […]
Introduction In class, we discussed the work of Mark Granovetter where he makes a connection between the social and structural roles of an edge and claims that weak ties have access to different parts of the network. In the slides, we learned of the strength of weak ties theory which states that networks are composed of […]