Friends don’t Lie – Inferring Personality Traits from Social Network Structure

In this work, we investigate the relationships between social network structure and personality; we assess the performances of different subsets of structural network features, and in particular those concerned with ego-networks, in predicting the Big-5 personality traits. In addition to traditional survey-based data, this work focuses on social networks derived from real-life data gathered through smartphones. Besides showing that the latter are superior to the former for the task at hand, our results provide a fine-grained analysis of the contribution the various feature sets are able to provide to personality classification, along with an assessment of the relative merits of the various networks exploited.

Speaker Details

Jacopo Staiano is a PhD Candidate under supervision of Prof. Nicu Sebe at the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento (Italy). He has obtained the bachelor degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Pisa (Italy) in 2003, a MA in Sonic Arts from the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University of Belfast (Northern Ireland, UK) in 2005, and a MSc in Human Language Technologies and Interfaces from the University of Trento (Italy) in 2010.

In 2008 he has joined the Intelligent Systems Lab of the University of Amsterdam, where he has worked on several computer vision and affective computing projects. His recent works include automated multi-modal analysis of human behavior, social signal processing, automatic personality recognition and social network analysis.

Date:
Speakers:
Jacopo Staiano
Affiliation:
University of Trento

Series: Microsoft Research Talks