The aim of this dissertation is to present work on a number of salient characteristics of elite relations in Sweden, studied from a social network analytic perspective. Elite integration, the distribution of elite power, and the significance of elites’ informal relations represent the three main themes explored in the original studies that comprise the thesis. Studies 1-3 concern elite relations at the local, i.e. municipal level of political decision-making, while research on parliamentary political elites is reported in Study 4. Studies 1-3 draw upon original complete network data collected through personal interviews with 248 local elites (politicians, corporate leaders, civil servants, etc.) active in four mid-sized Swedish municipalities. The question of local elite integration is investigated in Study 1, while the question of women elites’ potential access to structural power is studied in Study 2. These studies conclude that local elites are well integrated around structural cores of politicians and civil servants, and that women elites are on average not structurally disadvantaged due to their sex. Research concerning the role local elites’ involvement in associations like Rotary clubs is reported in Study 3. The results suggest that membership in such semi-exclusive voluntary settings may have an optimizing impact upon the elites’ personal networks, as far as their individual level social capital is concerned. In the final study (Study 4) focus is shifted to national political elites when a social network analytic perspective is utilized to study social cohesion within multiparty opposition coalitions recently formed in the Swedish Riksdag. The study concludes that the right wing-liberal Alliance coalition formed prior to the 2006 general elections was socially better integrated and more cohesive than the socialist-environmentalist coalition formed during the subsequent parliamentary cycle. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 1: Submitted. Paper 2: Submitted. Paper 4: Submitted.</p>

A blog webring is a self-organized online network that bloggers can join based on its thematic description. Drawing upon the theory of homophily in interpersonal communication, this paper examines webring themes and explores how they may be related to the salient characteristics in human identity to which people pay more attention in online communication. Research results suggest that blogs in a webring with a mixed theme or a theme based on acquired status are associated with a higher level of conversationality, with more embedded webring-bounded hyperlinks and more member comments. Bloggers from webrings of these two types of themes reportedly have a closer social relationship with other members. They are also more positive about the likelihood of getting social support from within their webrings. In general, people are not constrained by the limited interactivity offered by blogs; many of them employ not only other online, but also offline means of communication for interactions. As webring members, people believe that much more social support is available than they originally anticipated, and the specific types of social support that are perceived to be available are not determined by how easily they may be delivered online. This study overall supports the view that meaningful social relationships are developed and maintained on the Internet, which is essentially an extension of people’s daily lives. It also underscores the necessity that contextual specificity be privileged in future research on people’s online communication. / text

Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are being adopted with unprecedented speed. The growth in demand and system complexity increasingly requires collaboration of multiple parties in order to achieve better functionality, efficiency, performance, etc. This poses unique challenges such as information sharing among different parties, utility sharing among different parties, and dishonest and collusive behaviors. Different mobile services may require different types of collaboration and involve different entities in the system. In this work we take a bottom-up approach by first looking at collaboration at the end user level, then the cross level collaboration and finally at the service provider level. Specifically, we first consider a completely distributed service: friend discovery in mobile social networks, where users of a mobile social network work together with each other to discover potential new friends nearby by computing their social proximity. We develop mathematically sound yet highly efficient approaches that simultaneously achieve privacy and verifiability. We then focus on cellular offloading where a cellular service provider seeks third party resource to offload cellular demand, as an example of cross level collaboration. We propose a reverse auction framework: iDEAL, which efficiently allocates cellular resource and third party resource in a joint optimization, effectively incentivize third party resource owners and mitigates dishonest and collusive behaviors. We validate our findings and approaches with real trace driven analysis and simulation, as well as real implementation. Finally we focus on collaboration at the service provider level and propose a double auction framework - DA². DA² allows cellular service providers to reallocate spectrum resource in a dynamic fashsion. It preserves all the desired economic properties. Compared with existing spectrum double auctions, DA² achieves higher efficiency, revenue, and spectrum resource utilization, due to its ability to more accurately capture the competition among buyers, which is characterized by a complex conflict graph. We evaluate DA² and demonstrate its superior performance via simulations on conflict graphs generated with real cell tower locations. / text

Mobile social applications have emerged in recent years. They explore social connections among mobile users in a variety of novel scenarios, including friend finding, message routing, and content sharing. However, efficiently supporting resource-demanding delay-sensitive streaming applications on the mobile platform remains a significant challenge. Research on such topics will naturally widen the usage of mobile social applications. The solutions to the challenges will provide suggestion on many related work. It is interesting and valuable to explore the system performance and users’ experience in such scenarios. Furthermore, users’ concern about social network is also significant to develop a mobile social network application. It is important to detect users’ strategies to communicate with others. That influences the network topologies and provides biased connections. The strategy consists of various of aspects, most of which are the user preference and user social attributes. Focusing on this meaningful research field, we study collaborative VoD-type streaming of short videos among small groups of mobile users, so as to effectively exploit their social relationships. Such an application can be practically set in a number of usage scenarios, including streaming of introductory video clips of exhibition items to visitors’ mobile devices, such as in a museum. We analyze users’ behavior strategies based on their social preference and social attributes. We design SMS, an architecture that engineers such Streaming over Mobile Social networks. SMS constructs a collaborative streaming overlay by carefully inspecting social connections among users and infrastructure characteristics of Bluetooth technologies. To improve the performance, we analyze the scatternet structure of Bluetooth technology and propose appropriate scatternet structure in our system. We evaluate our design based on prototype implementation on the Android platform, as well as on a large emulation testbed. The results obtained indicate that we are able to achieve a well-performed streaming system in a mobile social network. / published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Master / Master of Philosophy

Social Network Sites (SNSs) are increasingly influencing the academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and settings. Although SNS has been claimed that it occupied too much of peoples’ daily lives by many researchers and scientists, the fact also demonstrates the growing use of SNS in education area, which proved that SNS has its unique pedagogical significance and potential to foster students’ learning experience. Used and promoted in many countries around the world, SNS is now not only serving as a social network environment (SNE) for people to communicate, but also a platform for academic information exchange and sharing in various contexts. This study aimed at exploring the differences between western and Chinese localised SNS, evaluating the practicability of SNS use in China’s education, and identifying certain problems in the implementation. Referenced by the literature on SNS experiment in teaching, cultural influence and pedagogy value, Chinese SNS would be analysed from comprehensive perspectives. This study combined two parts, one was the comparison study for four selected SNSs from China and foreign countries, the other was the research experiment conducted with a class of 17 students enrolling in an English educational institution in Chinese mainland, where the students took a spoken English course which lasted for one and a half month. The selected SNSs used in the experiment were implemented to facilitate the teaching and support designed learning process that requires students to explore the use of SNS and motivate them to interact more with peers and teacher off-class while completing the course objectives. Date collection and analysis conducted mixed methods in this research, the data of this research were collected by different levels of participants’ interviews, observations, recordings and questionnaires that covers the perceptions for research topic, everyday use of SNSs, taken-forgranted interactions and communication among teacher and students in the learning and teaching process. This research not only justify the practicability of SNS use in China’s education, it also revealed various functions that SNSs could provide in China’s education. In terms of functionality, it could serves as a platform for (a) facilitating presentation and demonstration, (b) developing personal learning record and portfolios, (c) distributing and sharing resources, (d) promoting student-teacher offline interaction, (e) enabling free comment and feedbacks. Theoretical research would be conducted and practical implementation would also be introduced. Through the experiment, the research would make the best of SNSs in education, which further discuss the special characteristics of Chinese localised SNSs and broaden the understanding of using SNS in education. Pedagogical principles are also discussed. / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

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The purpose of this research is to investigate, acquire knowledge, and better comprehend the transportation planning and modeling community. This task is accomplished through the investigation of existing social and professional networks within this community by constructing and analyzing an abstract network representation of this community. Specifically, this research explores the actors (i.e., professionals, agencies) and their relationships (i.e., ties, interactions, etc.) within the professional interpersonal (social) network where they conduct business on a regular basis. Actors and relationships are represented in terms of a nodes and links within the constructed network. The network is then analyzed in an effort to answer questions such as, who are the actors, where do interpersonal relationships exist, where are social structures found, what does the evolution of this community look like over time, and what can this evolution tell us. This study has collected information from transportation professionals directly associated with the decision-making, planning and/or modeling process within the transportation planning and modeling community. The data is collected through an in-house designed online survey disseminated to the identified target audience. The designed survey is structured to capture information required for the identification of actors and relationships (or entities and ties) within the transportation planning and modeling community. With the network constructed, analysis methods derived from mathematics, computer science and social network analysis fields are implemented to identify local and global patterns, "influential" actors, and collaborative structures as well as examine network dynamics, which transpire within the environment that these transportation professionals navigate, form bonds, and collect information on frequent basis.

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While computers and composition researchers are concerned with the theoretical and pedagogical impacts of new technologies in our field, these researchers have only recently begun to consider the ramifications of the growing use of online social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook in academia. This dissertation fills a much-needed space in the field in its consideration of the pedagogical implications of social networking sites. Online social networking sites can provide teachable moments to talk with students about audience, discourse communities, intellectual property, and the tensions between public and private writing. Thus, if writing instructors ignore the growing conversation regarding online social networking sites, they may potentially miss out on familiar and accessible spaces for teaching rhetorical analysis.In this dissertation, through a qualitative analysis of undergraduate students and university writing instructors, I trace common threads in these individuals' attitudes and perceived beliefs about MySpace and Facebook. In chapters 1 and 2 I draw on Michel Foucault's theories of bio-power and confession to raise questions and concerns regarding pedagogical uses and abuses of online social networking sites, focusing specifically on issues of privacy and surveillance. In chapter 3, I outline the methods and methodologies that guided the qualitative portion of my study; the results of this study are reported in chapters 4 (students' views of social networking) and 5 (instructors' views), respectively. In chapter 5, I use technological literacy as a framework to argue that the immense popularity of online social networking sites coupled with the sheer amount of writing produced by students in these sites provides a compelling reason for rhetoric and composition instructors to begin paying attention to online social networking sites. To conclude chapter 5, I provide specific classroom activities that focus on MySpace and Facebook for instructors interested in bringing social networking back to the classroom. These classroom materials can be adapted to multiple classroom settings and can be modified based on a particular instructor's pedagogical needs.

Homophily, the tendency for like to associate with like or for birds of a feather to flock together, is one of the most robust findings in all of social science. Despite its ubiquity and obvious importance, however, it is uncertain how much of this regularity derives from the tendency to become friends with those like ourselves (i.e. selection) as opposed to the tendency to become like those with whom we associate (i.e. harmonization). This dissertation grapples with the issue by proposing, first, that both forces play a role and, second, that the impact of one cannot be understood without also considering the effect of the other. After a review of the literature, theory is developed, data introduced, analytical techniques described, and then empirical analysis is undertaken. It is determined that several of the predicted combinations of selection and harmonization are, indeed, present and that these combinations can meaningfully inform our understanding of social life. Directions for future research are then discussed.