Abstracts Computer Science

Temporal Closeness in Knowledge Mobilization Networks

by William Doan

In this thesis we study the impact of time in the analysis of social networks. To do that we represent a knowledge mobilization network, Knowledge-Net, both as a standard static graph and a time-varying graph and study both graphs to see their differences. For our study, we implemented some temporal metrics and added them to Gephi, an open source software for graph and network analysis which already contains some static metrics. Then we used that software to obtain our results. Knowledge-Net is a network built using the knowledge mobilization concept. In social science, knowledge mobilization is defined as the use of knowledge towards the achievement of goals. The networks which are built using the knowledge mobilization concept make more visible the relations among heterogeneous human and non-human individuals, organizational actors and non-human mobilization actors. A time-varying graph is a graph with nodes and edges appearing and disappearing over time. A journey in a time-varying graph is equivalent to a path in a static graph. The notion of shortest path in a static graph has three variations in a time-varying graph: the shortest journey is the journey with the least number of temporal hops, the fastest journey is the journey that takes the least amount of time and the foremost journey is the journey that arrives the soonest. Out of those three, we focus on the foremost journey for our analysis.