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Information availability affects people's behavior and perception of the world. Notably, people rely on search engines to satisfy their need for information. Search engines deliver results relevant to user requests usually without being or…
The dynamics of information dissemination in social networks is of paramount importance in processes such as rumors or fads propagation, spread of product innovations or "word-of-mouth" communications. Due to the difficulty in tracking a…
Social influence plays an important role in human behavior and decisions. The sources of influence can be generally divided into external, which are independent of social context, or as originating from peers, such as family and friends. An…
Today, our more-than-ever digital lives leave significant footprints in cyberspace. Large scale collections of these socially generated footprints, often known as big data, could help us to re-investigate different aspects of our social…
Viral marketing campaigns target primarily those individuals who are central in social networks and hence have social influence. Marketing events, however, may attract diverse audience. Despite the importance of event marketing, the…
Datasets of online communication often take the form of contact sequences -- ordered lists contacts (where a contact is defined as a triple of a sender, a recipient and a time). We propose measures of attractiveness and activity for such…
We provide a model to investigate the tension between information aggregation and spread of misinformation in large societies (conceptualized as networks of agents communicating with each other). Each individual holds a belief represented…
The reports of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections brought into the center of public attention concerns related to the ability of foreign actors to increase social discord and take advantage of personal user data for…
Building on recent work studying content in the online advertising ecosystem, including our own prior study of political ads on the web during the 2020 U.S. elections, we analyze political ad content appearing on websites leading up to and…
Causally identifying the effect of digital advertising is challenging, because experimentation is expensive, and observational data lacks random variation. This paper identifies a pervasive source of naturally occurring, quasi-experimental…
Online advertising has been the major monetization approach for Internet companies. Advertisers invest budgets to bid for real-time impressions to gain direct and indirect returns. Existing works have been concentrating on optimizing direct…
Reducing traffic accidents is an important public safety challenge. However, the majority of studies on traffic accident analysis and prediction have used small-scale datasets with limited coverage, which limits their impact and…
This paper utilizes video analytics to study pedestrian and vehicle traffic behavior, focusing on analyzing traffic patterns during football gamedays. The University of Florida (UF) hosts six to seven home football games on Saturdays during…
Social influence drives both offline and online human behaviour. It pervades cultural markets, and manifests itself in the adoption of scientific and technical innovations as well as the spread of social practices. Prior empirical work on…
Recently, the emergence of the #MeToo trend on social media has empowered thousands of people to share their own sexual harassment experiences. This viral trend, in conjunction with the massive personal information and content available on…
Large-scale human mobility data is a key resource in data-driven policy making and across many scientific fields. Most recently, mobility data was extensively used during the COVID-19 pandemic to study the effects of governmental policies…
We outline a planned experiment to investigate if personal data (e.g., demographics and behavioral patterns) can be used to selectively expose individuals to disinformation such that an adversary can spread disinformation more efficiently…
To what extent are users surveilled on the web, by what technologies, and by whom? We answer these questions by combining passively observed, anonymized browsing data of a large, representative sample of Americans with domain-level data on…
Human trafficking is a widespread and compound social, economic, and human rights issue occurring in every region of the world. While there have been an increasing number of anti-human trafficking works from the Operations Research and…
Purpose: We model group advertising decisions, which are the collective decisions of every single advertiser within the set of advertisers who are competing in the same auction or vertical industry, and examine resulting market outcomes,…