Lisa Elkin

During the summer of 2012, I worked as an undergraduate research assistant in the Combinatorics and Optimization department at the University of Waterloo. I conducted a comprehensive review of relevant literature to determine the progress others in the mathematical community had made on the problem of influence maximization in social networks. Based on this review of existing literature, I established a research question with the guidance of my supervisor, Dr. Stephen Vavasis. Using tools from graph theory, probability, and convex optimization, I was able to establish conditions on the model that he created in which a maximal solution can be found. Dr. Vavasis continued to expand this work with Tin Kei Png and our collective efforts resulted in a paper that can be found here.