The spread of information in the blogosphere. First blog writes a post and then other
blogs refer to it. The behavior (information) spreads (cascades) through the network of blogs.
We plot the mount of information captured vs. the number of blogs read. We compare
our algorithm to current blog ranking techniques, like reading blogs with most in-links,
most posts, most out-links or just reading random blogs. See the
paper for details.
Water distribution networks
Same techniques and algorithms as used for blogs also apply to detecting disease outbreaks in water distribution
networks. Consider a city water distribution network, delivering water to households via pipes and junctions.
Intrusions can cause contaminants to spread over the network, and we want to select a few locations (pipe junctions)
to install sensors, in order to detect these contaminations as quickly as possible.
The sensor placements obtained by our algorithm are provably near
optimal, providing a constant fraction of the optimal solution. Our
approach scales, achieving speedups and savings in
storage of several orders of magnitude.
City water distribution network. Circles show the
locations of placed sensors in order to detect water contaminations as quickly as
possible.