SocioTechnical Approaches to Information Dissemination

Outline

Given the current trend to obtain information anytime and anywhere, Information Dissemination is a critical technology/service for future generations under a variety of scenarios. In this course, we will develop an understanding of the key factors in effective dissemination to the public at large and design technology innovations to enable faster, robust and more effective content dissemination. For example, in the context of crisis alert systems, conveying accurate and timely information to those who are actually at risk (or likely to be), while providing reassuring information to those who are not at risk will provide a better response to the crisis at hand.
The course will explore key factors that pose significant challenges (social and technological) to effective information dissemination. These factors include variation in notification times for different applications (e.g. warning times in the emergency response case), determining the specificity of information to effectively communicate to different populations, and customization of the delivery process to reach the targeted populations in time over unreliable infrastructures and networks. The course will also explore how effective dissemination requires a multidisciplinary approach that

understands and utilizes the context in which the dissemination of information occurs to determine sources, recipients, channels of targeted messages
develop technological solutions that can deliver appropriate and accessible information to the public rapidly.

From a social science perspective, we will look into models and theories for information diffusion in social networks and the role of traditional and alternative independent communication technologies (blogs, social networks ala FaceBook, MySpace) in effectively reaching the target audience.
From a information technology and systems perspective, we will look at techniques to build highly customized, robust and timely dissemination services from unstable and unreliable resources over both wired and wireless networks using a variety of technologies such as peer-based architectures, wireless mesh networks and publish/subscribe architectures.

Presentations

April 1, 2008 -- Information Diffusion Simulation in the RBUSD Region (Ryan M. Acton)
April 8, 2008 -- 2007 Southern California Wildfires Research (Jeannette Sutton)
April 15, 2008 -- Why ethnography & information systems (Catherine Forsman)
April 15, 2008 -- Information Transmission System for Earthquake Early Warning (from The Taiwan-Japan Workshop on the Earthquake Early Warning System)
April 22, 2008 -- Application Layer Multicast for Earthquake Early Warning Systems (Valentina Bonsi)
April 29, 2008 -- Flashback (Abhishek Amit)

Readings

Information technology and systems

Wired data dissemination

Flashback: A Peer-to-PeerWeb Server for Flash Crowds
Mayur Deshpande, Abhishek Amit, Mason Chang, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, and Sharad Mehrotra
ICDCS'07 (27th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems), 2007

CREW: A Gossip-based Flash-Dissemination System
Mayur Deshpande ; Bo Xing ; Iosif Lazaridis ; Bijit Hore ; Nalini Venkatasubramanian ; Sharad Mehrotra ;
ICDCS’06 (International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems), 2006

SplitStream: High-Bandwidth Multicast in Cooperative Environments
Miguel Castro1 Peter Druschel Anne-Marie Kermarrec Animesh Nandi Antony Rowstron Atul Singh
SOSP’03, October 19-22, 2003

Bullet: High Bandwidth Data Dissemination Using an Overlay Mesh
Dejan Kosti´c, Adolfo Rodriguez, Jeannie Albrecht, and Amin Vahdat
SOSP’03, October 19-22, 2003

Scalable Application Layer Multicast
Suman Banerjee, Bobby Bhattacharjee, Christopher Kommareddy
SIGCOMM’02, August 19-23, 2002

SCRIBE: A large-scale and decentralized application-level multicast infrastructure
Miguel Castro, Peter Druschel, Anne-Marie Kermarrec and Antony Rowstron
IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 20, NO. 8, OCTOBER

Wireless data dissemination

The broadcast storm problem in a mobile ad hoc network
Sze-Yao Ni, Yu-Chee Tseng, Yuh-Shyan Chen, and Jang-Ping Sheu
Mobicom ‘99

A generic distributed broadcast scheme in ad hoc wireless networks
Jie Wu and Fei Dai
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTERS, VOL. 53, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2004

Double-covered broadcast (DCB): a simple reliable broadcast algorithm in MANETs
Wei Lou and Jie Wu
INFOCOM 2004. Twenty-third AnnualJoint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies

Anonymous Gossip: Improving Multicast Reliability in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks
Ranveer Chandra, Venugopalan Ramasubramanian, Kenneth P. Birman
21st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, 2001.

An Efficient Reliable Broadcast Protocol for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks
E. Vollset and P. Ezhilchelvan
University of Newcastle upon Tyne Technical Report Series, CS-TR-822 December 2003

The dynamic behavior of a data dissemination protocol for network programming at scale
Jonathan W. Hui and David Culler
SenSys’04, November 3-5, 2004

Matching data dissemination algorithms to application requirements
John Heidemann, Fabio Silva and Deborah Estrin
SenSys’03 November 5-7, 2003

Pub/Sub

HyperCBR: Large-Scale Content-Based Routing in a Multidimensional Space
Stefano Castelli, Paolo Costa, Gian Pietro Picco
INFOCOM 2008.

Meghdoot: Content-Based Publish/Subscribe over P2P Networks.
Abhishek Gupta, Ozgur D. Sahin, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi
Middleware 2004, 254-273

A Routing Scheme for Content-Based Networking.
Antonio Carzaniga, Matthew J. Rutherford, Alexander L. Wolf
Infocom 2004

Efficient event routing in content-based publish/subscribe service network.
Fengyun Cao, Jaswinder Pal Singh
Infocom 2004

Content-Based Publish-Subscribe over Structured Overlay Networks.
Roberto Baldoni, Carlo Marchetti, Antonino Virgillito, Roman Vitenberg
ICDCS 2005, 437-446

Towards an Internet-Scale XML Dissemination Service.
Yanlei Diao, Shariq Rizvi, Michael J. Franklin
VLDB 2004, 612-623

Dynamic Load Balancing in Distributed Content-based Publish/Subscribe.
Alex Cheung and Hans-Arno Jacobsen
Middleware 2006.

Effects of Routing Computations in Content-Based Routing Networks with Mobile Data Sources.
Vinod Muthusamy, Milenko Petrovic, Hans-Arno Jacobsen
MobiCom 2005.

Social science

Information diffusion, social networks and disasters

Complex Contagions and the Weakness of Long Ties
Centola, Damon and Macy, Michael. 2007
American Journal of Sociology, 113(3): 702--734.

How to Search a Social Network.
Adamic, Lada; Adar, Eytan. 2005
Social Networks, 27: 187--203.

The Effects of a Threatening Rumor on a Disaster-Stricken Community
Danzig, Elliott R.; Thayer, Paul W.; Galanter, Lila R. 1958
Publication 517, National Academy of Sciences---National Research Council. Washington, DC. Chapters 1--2, pp1--21.

Formulas for Spreading Opinions.
Dodd, Stuart Carter. 1958.
The Public Opinion Quarterly, 22 (4): 537--554. Related link

The Flow of Crisis Information as a Probe of Work Relations.
Erickson, Bonnie H.; Nosanchuk, T.A.; Mostacci, Liviana; Dalrymple, Christina Ford. 1978.
Canadian Journal of Sociology, 3(1): 71--87.

Community Size, Network Structure, and the Flow of Information.
Richardson, R. J.; Erickson, Bonnie H.; Nosanchuk, T.A. 1979.
Canadian Journal of Sociology, 4(4): 379--392.