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==Two Papers==
1 [http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/09/paper/view/184/565 A social identity approach to identify familiar strangers in a social network]

2 [http://www.cs.ust.hk/~qyang/Docs/2006/DM350_Shen_Dou.pdf Latent Friend Mining from Blog Data]

== Problem ==
In the ICDM 2006 paper, the authors defined a problem of finding the "latent friend", which is "people who share the similar topic distribution in their blogs. These people may or may not actually know each other, but they have the interest and potential to find each other out"

In the ICWSM 2009 paper, the authors defined a problem of finding the "familiar stranger", which is "individuals who are not directly connected but exhibit some similarity".

From the definition of the two problems, it's very similar. However, they focused on totally different challenges. In the ICDM paper, the major challenge that the authors were dealing with is how to measure similarity between two users, while the ICWSM paper was mainly dealing with how to narrow down the search space. As a result, even both of the papers were trying to solve similar problem, but they focused on totally different perspective.

== Algorithm ==
Because the two papers focused on totally different challenges, the methods used in those two papers are not comparable. In the ICDM paper, the authors proposed three methods to measure the similarity between two users without concerning about how to find them; In the ICWSM paper, the major task was how to find those similar users in a large graph given the definition of similarity.

In sum, the two papers focused on totally different perspective of the problem and the methods are not comparable.

== Dataset == 
Again, because of the different perspective of the two papers, they used different dataset to evaluation their methods. In the ICDM paper, the authors used MSN Space blog data and randomly selected 10k users so that the major concern is how to measure the similarity between two users without worrying about the scalability too much. 

The ICWSM paper used BlogCatalog and DBLP dataset. For both of datasets, the ICWSM paper used user metadata to define similarity and evaluated the proposed methods on a large scale.

== Big Idea == 
The two papers were solving similar problem from different perspectives, However, those two perspective are not likely to be combined easily as both of the papers make some simplifying assumption about other perspectives so that they can just focus on one.