Finding Communities in Social Media

The popularity of social media sites has increased exponentially in recent years. I am investigating the potential value of collecting and analyzing data from these sites. I will be presenting a survey of the state of the art of finding communities in social media. Some of this work has taken place in the UMBC Ebiquity lab. Then, I will discuss the plans for my own work, which focuses on finding close groups of friends using the social networking site, Facebook. The goal is to use machine-learning techniques to identify these groups automatically and evaluate the accuracy of the predictions.