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People's interests and people's social relationships are intuitively connected, but understanding their interplay and whether they can help predict each other has remained an open question. We examine the interface of two decisive…

The rise of digital platforms has enabled the large scale observation of individual and collective behavior through high resolution interaction data. This development has opened new analytical pathways for investigating how information…

People in conversation entrain their linguistic behaviours through spontaneous alignment mechanisms [7] - both in face-to-face and computer-mediated communication (CMC) [8]. In CMC, one of the mechanisms through which linguistic entrainment…

Understanding the way individuals are interconnected in social networks is of prime significance to predict their collective outcomes. Leveraging a large-scale dataset from a knowledge-sharing website, this paper presents an exploratory…

Social groups are fundamental elements of any social system. Their emergence and evolution are closely related to the structure and dynamics of a social system. Research on social groups was primarily focused on the growth and the structure…

The interaction between fringe subcultures and mainstream online communities poses significant challenges for understanding discourse on social media. In this work, we investigate whether users active in conspiracy-focused communities…

Innovation is the driving force of human progress. Recent urn models reproduce well the dynamics through which the discovery of a novelty may trigger further ones, in an expanding space of opportunities, but neglect the effects of social…

Many groups with diverse convictions are interacting online. Interactions in online communities help people to engage each other and enhance understanding across groups. Online communities include multiple sub-communities whose members are…

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) bring together a global crowd of thousands of learners for several weeks or months. In theory, the openness and scale of MOOCs can promote iterative dialogue that facilitates group cognition and knowledge…

This work is an attempt to discover hidden structural configurations in learning activity sequences of students in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Leveraging combined representations of video clickstream interactions and forum…

This paper investigates a model of opinion formation on an adaptive social network, consisting of a system of coupled ordinary differential equations for individuals' opinions and corresponding network edge weights. A key driver of the…

Decentralizing the governance of social computing systems to communities promises to empower them to make independent decisions, with nuance and in accordance with their values. Yet, communities do not govern in isolation. Many problems…

Social networks have become an increasingly common abstraction to capture the interactions of individual users in a number of everyday activities and applications. As a result, the analysis of such networks has attracted lots of attention…

Information in networks is non-uniformly distributed, enabling individuals in certain network positions to get preferential access to information. Social scientists have developed influential theories about the role of network structure in…

Dialogue structure discovery is essential in dialogue generation. Well-structured topic flow can leverage background information and predict future topics to help generate controllable and explainable responses. However, most previous work…

Political misinformation, astroturfing and organised trolling are online malicious behaviours with significant real-world effects. Many previous approaches examining these phenomena have focused on broad campaigns rather than the small…

Online socio-technical systems can be studied as proxy of the real world to investigate human behavior and social interactions at scale. Here we focus on Instagram, a media-sharing online platform whose popularity has been rising up to…

The explosive growth of social media has not only revolutionized communication but also brought challenges such as political polarization, misinformation, hate speech, and echo chambers. This dissertation employs computational social…

Open-source software communities thrive on global collaboration and contributions from diverse participants. This study explores the Rust programming language ecosystem to understand its contributors' demographic composition and interaction…

Analysing patterns of engagement among citizen science participants can provide important insights into the organisation and practice of individual citizen science projects. In particular, methods from statistics and network science can be…