Lise Getoor, her student, and colleagues win Best Paper Award at the 2012 ASE International Conference on Social Informatics

Lise Getoor, her student, Hossam Sharara, and colleagues, Lisa Singh and Janet Mann, won the Best Paper Award for their paper "Stability vs. Diversity: Understanding the Dynamics of Actors in Time-varying Affiliation Networks" at the 2012 ASE International Conference on Social Informatics, Washington D.C.

Abstract:
Most networks contain embedded communities or groups that impact the overall gathering and dissemination of ideas and information. These groups consist of important or prominent individuals who actively participate in network activities over time. In this paper, we introduce a new method for identifying actors with prominent group memberships in time-varying affiliation networks. We define a prominent actor to be one who participates in the same group regularly (stability) and participates across different groups consistently (diversity), thereby having a position of structural influence in the network. We illustrate the utility of our measures by demonstrating their complementary nature when compared to existing centrality measures on several different real-world affiliation networks.