Facebook Visualization Challenge

Our Facebook data was recently used for a data visualization challenge at a workshop, and the participants at that workshop did a better job of visualizing our data than we did.

Of course, we're not visualization experts, and we don't even play ones on TV. I very much appreciate scientific visualization, however! (I'll have more to say about that in a few days when a certain book review that I wrote officially comes out.) The purpose of our visualization mentioned in the blog post was to motivate the quantitative methods that we developed in the paper. (The purpose of the paper was to develop those methods.)

The author of the blog post to which I've linked wrote "it's rumored that the authors had access to 100". Well, those rumors are true, and we might be releasing the data from the other 95 universities as early as next week. :) Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, the paper (to appear in SIAM Review) in which we analyze the "Facebook5" data set (the name appears to have stuck, so I suppose we should have been more clever!) can be found here.

Anyway, it's way cool that one of our data sets has now reached the lofty status of benchmark!

And, by the way, the correct spelling of my alma mater is "Caltech". :)