Bernardo A. Huberman, Senior Fellow and Director, Social Computing Lab, HP Labs
Social media continuously generates a prodigious wealth of real-time content. And yet, from all the content that people create and share, only a few topics manage to attract enough attention to rise to the top and become the trends that are displayed to users. An important question is what factors cause the formation and persistence of these trends since their persistence and decay tends to shape the social agenda.
I’ll report the results of an extensive study of trending topics on Twitter and SinaWeibo as well as discuss the factors that determine the formation of long time trends and their evolution.
Bernardo Huberman is a Senior HP Fellow and Director of the Social Computing Lab at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania, and is currently a Consulting Professor in the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University. He originally worked in condensed matter physics, ranging from superionic conductors to two-dimensional superfluids, and made contributions to the theory of critical phenomena in low dimensional systems