Research from Meta

All Publications

June 6, 2010
Ashish Thusoo, Dhruba Borthakur, Raghotham Murthy, Zheng Shao, Namit Jain, Hao Liu, Suresh Antony, Joydeep Sen Sarma

Scalable analysis on large data sets has been core to the functions of a number of teams at Facebook - both engineering and non-engineering. Apart from ad hoc analysis of data and creation of business intelligence dashboards by analysts across the company, a number of Facebook's site features are also based on analyzing large data sets.

April 26, 2010
Lars Backstrom, Eric Sun, Cameron Marlow

Geography and social relationships are inextricably intertwined; the people we interact with on a daily basis almost always live near us. As people spend more time online, data regarding these two dimensions -- geography and social relationships -- are becoming increasingly precise, allowing us to build reliable models to describe their interaction. These models have important implications in the design of location-based services, security intrusion detection, and social media supporting local communities.

April 19, 2010
Jonathan Chang, Itamar Rosenn, Lars Backstrom, Cameron Marlow

We propose an approach to determine the ethnic break-down of a population based solely on people’s names and data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. We demonstrate that our approach is able to predict the ethnicities of individuals as well as the ethnicity of an entire population better than natural alternatives.

February 1, 2010
Moira Burke, Cameron Marlow, Thomas Lento

Previous research has shown a relationship between use of social networking sites and feelings of social capital. However, most studies have relied on self-reports by college students. The goals of the current study are to (1) validate the common self-report scale using empirical data from Facebook, (2) test whether previous findings generalize to older and international populations, and (3) delve into the specific activities linked to feelings of social capital and loneliness.