Research on social networks has begun to take advantage of data that reveal fine-grained communications over time and their role in coordination, decision-making, and information sharing. These studies, however, have focused primarily on social communication as a phenomenon that is endogenous to the network; they have not generally analyzed how changes to the communication structure are associated with external events. How social networks structurally respond to external events, and how structural changes predict shifts in the networks communicative functioning, are questions that have remained largely unanswered.

Daniel Romero, assistant professor at the School of Information, will present a study on how external events are associated with a network’s change in structure and communication content. Analyzing all the millions of instant messages of the decision-makers in a large hedge fund and their network of hundreds of outside contacts, he investigates the relationship between stock price shocks and changes in the structure and content of the firms decision-making network.
'Daniel Romero is an assistant professor and post-doctoral Presidential Fellow in the School of Information. He holds a PhD in applied mathematics from Cornell University and an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Arizona State University. His main research interest is the empirical and theoretical analysis of Social and Information Networks. He is particularly interested in understanding the mechanisms involved in network evolution, information diffusion, and user interactions on the Web.