Related papers: Four Degrees of Separation, Really
Network segmentation is a popular security practice for limiting lateral movement, yet practitioners lack a metric to measure how segmented a network actually is. We define segmentedness as the fraction of potential node-pair communications…
Despite proportionality being one of the tenets of data protection laws, we currently lack a robust analytical framework to evaluate the reach of modern data collections and the network effects at play. We here propose a graph-theoretic…
A fundamental feature for understanding the diffusion of innovations through a social group is the manner in which we are influenced by our own social interactions. It is usually assumed that only direct interactions, those that form our…
Physical distancing, as a measure to contain the spreading of Covid-19, is defining a "new normal". Unless belonging to a family, pedestrians in shared spaces are asked to observe a minimal (country-dependent) pairwise distance. Coherently,…
As "Big Data" has become pervasive, an increasing amount of research has connected the dots between human behaviour in the offline and online worlds. Consequently, researchers have exploited these new findings to create models that better…
The pervasive use of social media has grown to over two billion users to date, and is commonly utilized as a means to share information and shape world events. Evidence suggests that passive social media usage (i.e., viewing without taking…
The intensification of affective polarization worldwide has raised new questions about how social media platforms might be further fracturing an already-divided public sphere. As opposed to ideological polarization, affective polarization…
Analysis of opinion dynamics in social networks plays an important role in today's life. For applications such as predicting users' political preference, it is particularly important to be able to analyze the dynamics of competing opinions.…
The new information and communication technology providers collect increasing amounts of personal data, a lot of which is user generated. Unless use policies are privacy-friendly, this leaves users vulnerable to privacy risks such as…
The rapid growth of social media as a news platform has raised significant concerns about the influence and societal impact of biased and unreliable news on these platforms. While much research has explored user engagement with news on…
In social networks, a single user may create multiple accounts to spread his / her opinions and to influence others, by actively comment on different news pages. It would be beneficial to both social networks and their communities, to…
Most social, technological and biological networks are embedded in a finite dimensional space, and the distance between two nodes influences the likelihood that they link to each other. Indeed, in social systems, the chance that two…
Profile images on social networks are users' opportunity to present themselves and to affect how others judge them. We examine what Facebook images say about users' perceived and measured intelligence. 1,122 Facebook users completed a…
The COVID-19 pandemic offers an unprecedented natural experiment providing insights into the emergence of collective behavioral changes of both exogenous (government mandated) and endogenous (spontaneous reaction to infection risks) origin.…
We created an introductory physics activity for undergrad students consisting in measuring by different methods the same physical quantity. It allows to confront students with questions of uncertainty, precision, and model versus theory.…
Social networks have many counter-intuitive properties, including the "friendship paradox" that states, on average, your friends have more friends than you do. Recently, a variety of other paradoxes were demonstrated in online social…
The ongoing globalisation of science has undisputedly a major impact on how and where scientific research is being conducted nowadays. Yet, the big picture remains blurred. It is largely unknown where this process is heading, and at which…
The Hausdorff distance is a measure of (dis-)similarity between two sets which is widely used in various applications. Most of the applied literature is devoted to the computation for sets consisting of a finite number of points. This has…
Let $G$ be a connected graph. The average distance of a vertex $v$ of $G$ is the arithmetic mean of the distances from $v$ to all other vertices of $G$. The proximity and remoteness of $G$ are defined as the minimum and maximum,…
Anecdotally, social connections made in university have life-long impact. Yet knowledge of social networks formed in college remains episodic, due in large part to the difficulty and expense involved in collecting a suitable dataset for…