Community discovery and information flow in networks

The dynamics of information within social groups is relevant to issues of productivity, innovation and the sorting out of useful ideas from the general chatter of a community. How information spreads and is aggregated determines the speed with which individuals and organizations can act and plan their future activities. This talk will describe new mechanisms for automatically identifying communities of practice within organizations and for elucidating the spread of information within those communities. Many of these mechanisms rely on the scale-free nature of social networks.