Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

One of the research thrusts I'm currently pursuing is evaluating how much we can trust crowd sourced data provided by users in a large multi-user network with social components. As a first step I've been considering some popular user-data networks and current efforts in literature in order to gain an understanding of some of the general dynamics of such systems. As you'll see, these dynamics can be best described, from a very high level, as a dependency on the interactions between users or, in some cases, autonomous agents, and their behavior in the system. The ultimate goal is to consider the quality of data the users/agents provide as their "behavior." These networks need not necessarily be social networks but can include social-centric services such as Waze  (a navigation application that uses user provided data on current traffic conditions and locations), Glassdoor  (a job search and company information site that uses user provided data on salaries and benefi...