Social network research nets U of T student big prize

At this year's Association for Computing Machinery awards banquet in San Diego, U of T student Stratis Ioannidis was awarded second place in the graduate category for his work "On the Distribution of Content Updates over a Mobile Social Network."

Sponsored by Microsoft Research, the internationally recognized award enables students to experience sharing their research results and ideas with other students, judges, and conference attendees. He is one of the three graduate students who qualified for the ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) Grand Finals at the awards dinner The finalists, hailed from colleges and universities in the U.S., Canada, Japan and India.

Ioannidis' award-winning research was done while he was interning at the research lab of Thomson, in Paris, France, where he is now doing his post-doctoral work.

"The main premise behind this work is that more and more people want to access online content on their cellphones. Modern devices, like Windows Smartphones or the iPhone make this possible: users surf the web, read news sites or blogs or learn about road traffic on their way to work," he explained.

"Normally, users get such content directly from their service provider; however, given the sheer number of people accessing content on their cellphones every day, there is a great opportunity to get such information from other cellphone users. For example, somebody else in your street may have already downloaded on their iPhone the status of the 401, or someone in your math class may have already downloaded the latest post on your favourite blog. Getting this content directly from their device, as opposed to downloading from the network, reduces the traffic load (and the costs) of the service provider."

Ioannidis said the challenge is then for service providers to decide which devices should get the updates.

"This is where social networks come in," he explained that more social users should be targeted by the service provider because of their numerous "contacts". "The service provider needs to understand what the social network formed by mobile users - the 'mobile social network' - looks like. This challenge intrigued me because it showed that social networks can affect, in very concrete way, a real-life application."

Iaonnidis and co-researchers Augustin Chaintreau and Laurent Massoulie addressed the challenge by determining the importance of users based on their social behaviour and then used this information to suggest to the service provider which users should be given the content updates.

Nearly 200 students applied to participate in the SRC this year.

The first place winner in the graduate category was Xu Liu of the University of Maryland, College Park for his research on mobile currency readers for people with visual impairments.

The recognition from the ACM and the greater computing community is very valuable according to Ioannidis: "I was very happy to receive this award and deeply honoured to have the chance to participate in this event. Being in the presence of so many visionary researchers in the field was very inspiring."

"It was an invaluable experience," he added, "and I would highly encourage every student in computer science to participate. I very much enjoyed the opportunity to discuss my work one-on-one with other researchers and receive their feedback. It was also great to have the chance to listen to other people present their work and get to know the recent trends in mobile communications research."

Source: University of Toronto