Modeling and Predicting the Growth and Death of Websites

• Quem: Bruno Ribeiro (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Onde: FGV - Praia de Botafogo, 190, sala 317
• Quando: 20 de Março de 2014 às 13:00h

Driven by outstanding success stories of Internet startups such as Facebook and The Huffington Post, recent studies have thoroughly described their growth. These highly visible online success stories,however, overshadow an untold number of similar ventures that fail. The study of website popularity is ultimately incomplete without general mechanisms that can describe both successes and failures. In this talk, the speaker will present a model that is able to describe website popularity and predict evolution over time. The model is inspired by the writings of Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon. In a 1969 lecture Simon observed that many information systems were designed as if information was scarce, when the problem is just the opposite. “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” The model equations consider Internet users’attention as a scarce resource that must be “consumed” by a website. Users`interactions with the website also create content that consumes the attention of other users. For instance, if the attention we dedicate to Facebook incites us to create content that helps Facebook capture a larger share of attention of our friends, then our friends will also produce more content (on average), which in turn captures a larger share of our attention. This positive attention feedback loop drives Facebook user activity up. But as the attention we are willing to dedicate to Facebook is limited, our (average) activity eventually stabilizes and remains stable. Conversely, if the share of our attention consumed by the website is not able to drive enough attention and content creation from our friends to keep our current attention level, then the negative attention feedback drives the website to its death. This talk is targeted to a diverse audience of undergraduate and graduate students majoring in computer science, physics, economics, and the social sciences.

Biography

Bruno Ribeiro is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science. He received his B.Sc and M.Sc from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and Ph.D. in 2010 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2012-2013 he was a visiting scholar at the Department Physics at Northeastern University. His interests are in data science, data mining, complex systems, and statistical models.

Important

• Not required a confirmation.
• FGV not allow the entrance of people wearing shorts and/or slippers.

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