Milton Freisen will be presenting a paper by JP Onnela "Geographic constraints on social network groups" (posted here: http://jponnela.com/web_documents/a31.pdf)

Social groups are fundamental building blocks of human societies. While our social interactions have always been constrained by geography, it has been impossible, due to practical difficulties, to evaluate the nature of this restriction on social group structure. We construct a social network of individuals whose most frequent geographical locations are also known. We also classify the individuals into groups according to a community detection algorithm. We study the variation of geographical span for social groups of varying sizes, and explore the relationship between topological positions and geographic positions of their members. We find that small social groups are geographically very tight, but become much more clumped when the group size exceeds about 30 members. Also, we find no correlation between the topological positions and geographic positions of individuals within network communities. These results suggest that spreading processes face distinct structural and spatial constraints.

Milton adds:

I will be discussing it in connection with my own evolving doctoral framework, which is a short document that I've also attached. 

My structure will be to make some remarks about JPs paper, then present the nature of the problems I'm investigating, with group reflection on how that might or might not work, where the network angles are, etc. I will move between the technical aspects and the contexts where network science may be able to generate novel and useful insight.

Reference:

Onnela, J.P., S. Arbesman, M.C. González, A.L. Barabási, and N.A. Christakis. 2011. “Geographic Constraints on Social Network Groups.” PLoS One 6 (4): e16939.