CSE Grad Student Wins Best Student Paper at Web Science Conference

Ph.D. candidate Lujun (Tony) Fang has won the Best Student Paper Award in Computer Science with coauthors Alex Fabrikant (Google) and Prof. Kristen LeFevre (Google/U-M) at the ACM Web Science 2012 Conference, which took place June 22 – 24, 2012 in Evanston, IL.

The paper, entitled “Look Who I Found: Understanding the Effects of Sharing Curated Friend Groups,” addresses the burdens of contact discovery and grouping in social networks, and investigates the impact that contact group sharing (“circle-sharing” in Google+) has had on the growth and structure of the Google+ social network. It shows how circle-sharing has accelerated the “densification” rate of community circles, and also that it has disproportionately affected users with few connections. Finally, the authors identify features that can be used to predict which of a user’s circles (s)he is most likely to share, thus demonstrating that it is feasible to suggest to a user which circles to share with friends.

Lujun Fang is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. He works with Prof. LeFevre in the Database Research Group. His interests include large scale data analysis and mining, data management systems, and data privacy.