  In this paper, we introduce the concept of influential communities in a
co-author network. We term a community as the most influential if the community
has the highest influence among all other communities in the entire network.
Influence of a community depends on the impact of the contents (e.g., citations
of papers) generated by the members of that community. We propose an algorithm
to identify the top K influential communities of an online social network. As a
working prototype, we develop a visualization system that allows a user to find
the top K influential communities from a co-author network. A user can search
top K influential communities of particular research fields and our system
provides him/her with a visualization of these communities. A user can explore
the details of a community, such as authors, citations, and collaborations with
other communities.
