Information Diffusion at Workplace

Abstract

People nowadays need to spend a large amount of time on their work everyday and workplace has become an important social occasion for effective communication and information exchange among employees. Besides traditional online contacts (e.g., face-to-face meetings and telephone calls), to facilitate the communication and cooperation among employees, a new type of online social networks has been launched inside the firewalls of many companies, which are named as the "enterprise social networks" (ESNs). In this paper, we want to study the information diffusion among employees at workplace via both online ESNs and online contacts. This is formally defined as the IDE (Information Diffusion in Enterprise) problem. Several challenges need to be addressed in solving the IDE problem: (1) diffusion channel extraction from online ESN and online contacts; (2) effective aggregation of the information delivered via different diffusion channels; and (3) communication channel weighting and selection. A novel information diffusion model, Muse (Multi-source Multi-channel Multi-topic diffUsion SElection), is introduced in this paper to resolve these challenges. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world ESN and organizational chart dataset demonstrate the outstanding performance of Muse in addressing the IDE problem.