[Italian version]
We are happy to announce that the SIGSNA team has just been awarded of some new research funds. The funds coming from the FIRB – future in research – funding action of the Italian Minister of Research and University are awarded only to young researcher under the age of 32 yo.
Our research project: “Information monitoring, propagation analysis and community detection in Social Network Sites ” brings the work we’ve done so far to a next level aiming at working within a multiple SNSs scenario.
The main objectives of this project are:
1) The development of monitoring tools and models, to filter relevant messages among millions of textual interactions and to identify distributed conversations made
of these messages.
2) The study of how information propagates in SNSs, following complementary approaches: the evaluation of mathematical propagation models on real data, the
identification of propagation patterns and the development of sociological models to explain these patterns.
3) The definition of new metrics to provide meaningful descriptions of large SNSs and their application to identify communities and other relevant structures hidden
inside the networks.
The project – as well as the SIGSNA prject – is based on a collaboration between the Department of Communication Studies of the University of Urbino and the Department of Computer Science of the University of Bologna.
The length of the FIRB research funds (3 years) and the large amount of funds (approx. 760K USD) will allow us to move deeper into the direction of high performance computing techniques applied to social network data. This is a research direction that we barely started and that seems to be quite promising.
[eng version]
Siamo estremamente felici di comunicare che il gruppo di ricerca SIGSNA ha vinto un importante finanziamento FIRB (futuro in ricerca) riservato ai progetti di ricerca presentati da ricercatori non strutturati con meno di 32 anni. Il progetto che abbiamo presentato si configura come un evoluzione di molte delle linee di ricerca che abbiamo portato avanti fino a questo momento. Al tempo stesso la lunghezza e l’importo del finanziamento (3 anni e ca 560mila € in totale) ci permettono di progettare un nuovo e più avanzato livello.
La sfida è infatti quella di analizzare un contesto estremamente complesso senza ridurlo ad un unico ambiente digitale ma affrontando l’intero ecosistema digitale. Ovviamente in quest’ottica alcuni dei lavori che abbiamo sviluppato fin ad ora (come il ML-model) insieme all’utilizzo di tecnologie HPC ci saranno di grande aiuto.