Welcome to my website...
I am a PhD student in Computer Science studying at the University of Ottawa, Canada under supervision of prof. Benyoucef. I got my master's degree in Electronic Business Technologies (e-business) from univeristy of Ottawa, and my bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering (Software) from Islamic Azad Univeristy (South Tehran), Iran.
Research Interests...
My current research is focused on identifying influence and influential users in large online social networks. The topic is interesting because, recently, businesses try to exploit the advantages of social networks in their advertising and marketing campaigns, and the social networks become important due to the fact that they are an information hub, and a huge customer base. Among all social network users, some can influence their community more than others. Accurately detecting social influence provides multiple benefits for business such as the effectiveness of viral advertisement, and a better user involvement in product design. Many techniques have been developed to detect influential social network users in social sciences, marketing, and recently mathematics and computer science research. Social science and marketing techniques are more useful for the offline world and small groups while mathematical solutions better fit online social networks. Online social networks are different from offline social networks in a sense that the interactions are not always two-way, and users may create directed influence rather than the mutual influence which exists in offline social networks. Meanwhile, spammers and fake friends can only exist in online social networks. Existing methods for identifying influential people do not handle these issues effectively and may actually return inaccurate result. Moreover, social network users can only be influential in a certain variety of topics, and knowing that who can influence in what is very important in advertising campaigns as well as sale predication techniques. This proposal describes our intention to integrate different techniques and provide a solution that covers all mentioned shortcomings of existing techniques.
My other research interests include:
- Service Oriented Architecture
- Business Process Modeling
- Social Network Analysis
- Software Engineering
- Data Mining
- Trust