Atta Ur Rehman, a Ph.D. student in mining and nuclear engineering, will present a talk at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 12, in the loft at the Public House Brewing Co. in Rolla. His presentation is titled “Investigating Information Diffusion Potential of Social Media Networks for Effective Community Engagement.”

Rehman is a graduate research and teaching assistant at S&T. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mining from the University of Engineering and Technology (UET) in Lahore, Pakistan. He has over five years of public and private service experience.

Information diffusion potential of a social media user affects how quickly information about a mineral project can diffuse through that user. If management can use social media and network analysis in a community engagement program to understand how fast and how far information will diffuse to communities and followers of particular social media, it can selectively focus on the most influential users.

Rehman will propose a method to examine the information diffusion potential of social media accounts. The work uses Gephi, an open source software, to extract and analyze data from Twitter handles to predict their information diffusion potential. The work uses case studies of Twitter users (e.g. mining news organizations and bloggers) associated with mining to illustrate the approach. The case study results show that there are significant disparities in information diffusion potential that will demand selective attention. This research will help mines develop effective social media engagement strategies.