We are studying the diffusion of information, social networks, and the rise of self-organizing systems on the web.

In the past decade, online information networks have fundamentally transformed the ways that people obtain news and current events, communicate with one another, seek advice, shop, travel, and are entertained. One of the primary distinguishing aspects of these networks is that they are produced collectively by the actions and interactions of large numbers of individual actors. For instance, today's blogs, discussion boards, online auctions, and even the links between personal webpages all arise out of the interactions of multiple individuals whose decisions are largely unconstrained by institutional rules and uncoordinated by procedures for centralized governance. The rapid rise in the popularity and scope of online information networks has attracted considerable attention from scientists in a broad range of disciplines, including sociology, economics, communication, computer science, physics and applied mathematics.
The pervasive use by citizens and decision-makers of online resources for communication and education. In addition, the emergence of self-organizing systems on the Internet. This project is critical for educators and researchers to understand how to effectively use the Internet and mobile appliances to disseminate information, how users search for information, and form online communities.

We have been studying dynamic networks and individual personality, opinions, and beliefs of participants in these online communities (i.e., blogs, wikis, MySpace, etc.). Traditional social network analytic studies tend to take network structure as a given and disregard how attributes and characteristics of agents within a network impact an evolving network structure as well as each agent's emergent position within those structures. At the same time, research on individual differences (e.g., personality psychology or opinion research) tends to ignore the larger social network within which an agent is situated. However, research in Cornell's HCI lab has begun to uncover important effects on an agent's location in a network (e.g., central or peripheral, brokerage positions, etc.) that flow from the specific characteristics and attributes of the agent. We have started to develop tools for analyzing large data sets.

This research aims to understand how these communities work. It is through this understanding that we can begin to understand how the online media is used in day to day operations.
We have also brought in the entire internet archive (all web activity over the past 10 years) to the Cornell Theory Center. Other researchers across the world will have access to this archive and tools that we are in the process of developing.

Dissemination and diffusion of information

Microsoft

• Daniel Huttenlocher (Computer Science)
• Michael Macy (Sociology)
• Jon Kleinberg (Computer Science)