Research overview
We tackle novel problems risen with the advent of online media: What happens to the privacy of users? Is the online really more diverse in options? Is there a trade-off?
Our recent projects include:
- Studying the edit history of Wikipedia over 13 years, showing that a user’s past activity could reveal their private traits (gender, education, religion), even for retired users.
- Longitudinal measurements of millions of YouTube videos over 4-5 years, portraying the landscape of popularity, engagement, and the (un)predictability of the former.
- Models that explain a YouTube videos’ popularity as a continuous interaction of external events and information diffusion.
The results of this project will help understand new social phenomena manifesting in the online, such as mechanisms to regulate and incentivize allocation of attention, and connections to distributed decision-making.