Informatik Fachvortrag: Social Network Analysis and Agent-based Models

Dozent: Dr. Enrico Franchi, Universität Parma

Abstract:
In the last ten years, the pervasive adoption of social networking sites has deeply
changed the web in such a way that it became an unprecedented social phenomenon.
These events generated a renewed interest in social and complex network analysis in
the academic community, and agent-based modeling and simulations are now popular
choices to gather insight on social networks. However, the models are often difficult to
compare and there are almost no specific tools for the purpose of efficient large scale
simulations.
We present: (i) a unified conceptual framework to express both novel agent-based and
traditional social network models, and (ii) a user-friendly software platform that can
execute such models in an agent-oriented context, providing effective support for large
networks. Applications to P2P social networking systems, and specifically to the wellknown
issue of the availability of rare resources will also be discussed.