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|  | Yun Huang is a research associate in the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) research group at Northwestern University. My research interests include: Individual behavior, interactions, and virtual teams in digital-enabled environments such as scientific collaboration, online communities, and virtual worlds; analyzing the dynamic and evolution of individual relations using data mining, social network analysis, and economics approaches. |
Group Relationship in Online Communities
 | I study the group collaboration in various applications including teams in games, scientific collaboration, tool development teams in nanoHUB.org, and NSF proposal collaborations. |
Online Game
| | In the NSF project, “Virtual Worlds: An Exploratorium for Theorizing and Modeling the Dynamics of Group Behavior,” we use SONY’s Everquest II game as a testbed to model individual interactions in online social networks. Using the multi-theoretical and multi-level framework (MTML) and exponential random graph models (p*/ERGM), we characterize players’ motivations and the social drivers behind their dyadic relationship, grouping collaboration, and churn behavior and map them to corresponding network structures. The findings are used to make predictions on their future activities and help further business decisions. |
Peer-to-Peer Music Sharing
| | In my recent paper on the incentive of sharing in peer-to-peer communities, I demonstrate that the motivation of sharers is determined by their experience and recognition in the community. These studies examine some social theories of individual incentives in online communities and provide a foundation to model individual behavior using social network analysis. |
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