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Mixing describes the process by which solutes evolve from an initial heterogeneous state to uniformity under the stirring action of a fluid flow. Fluid stretching forms thin scalar lamellae which coalesce due to molecular diffusion. Owing…
In an increasingly polarized world, demagogues who reduce complexity down to simple arguments based on emotion are gaining in popularity. Are opinions and online discussions falling into demagoguery? In this work, we aim to provide…
The dynamics of thin volatile droplets comprising of binary mixtures deposited on a heated substrate are investigated. Using lubrication theory, we develop a novel one-sided model to predict the spreading and retraction of an evaporating…
Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable performance in generation tasks. Nevertheless, explaining the diffusion process remains challenging due to it being a sequence of denoising noisy images that are difficult for experts to…
Inspired by e-participation systems, in this paper we propose a new model to represent human debates and methods to obtain collective conclusions from them. This model overcomes drawbacks of existing approaches by allowing users to…
This doctoral work focuses on three main problems related to social networks: (1) Orchestrating Network Formation: We consider the problem of orchestrating formation of a social network having a certain given topology that may be desirable…
Uncertainty persists over how and why some countries become democratic and others do not, or why some countries remain democratic and others 'backslide' toward autocracy. Furthermore, while scholars generally agree on the nature of…
We focus on the potential fragility of democratic elections given modern information-communication technologies (ICT) in the Web 2.0 era. Our work provides an explanation for the cascading attrition of public officials recently in the…
A mathematical model for the evolution of, and deposition from, a thin particle-laden droplet on an infinitely thick, isotropic, flooded, porous substrate with interconnected pores undergoing simultaneous evaporation and imbibition is…
Given a set of conflicting arguments, there can exist multiple plausible opinions about which arguments should be accepted, rejected, or deemed undecided. We study the problem of how multiple such judgments can be aggregated. We define the…
Stochastic spreading models defined on complex network topologies are used to mimic the diffusion of diseases, information, and opinions in real-world systems. Existing theoretical approaches to the characterization of the models in terms…
We propose a simple model for a binary decision making process on a graph, motivated by modeling social decision making with cooperative individuals. The model is similar to a random field Ising model or fiber bundle model, but with key…
Aggregated phenomena in social sciences and economics are highly dependent on the way individuals interact. To help understanding the interplay between socio-economic activities and underlying social networks, this paper studies a…
Imitation learning with diffusion models has advanced robotic control by capturing the multi-modal action distributions. However, existing methods typically treat observations only as high-level conditions to the denoising network, rather…
Public discourse and opinions stem from multiple social groups. Each group has beliefs about a topic (such as vaccination, abortion, gay marriage, etc.), and opinions are exchanged and blended to produce consensus. A particular measure of…
Distributed voting is a fundamental topic in distributed computing. In pull voting, in each step every vertex chooses a neighbour uniformly at random, and adopts its opinion. The voting is completed when all vertices hold the same opinion.…
We present a confocal-microscopy study of demixing and remixing in binary liquids containing colloidal particles. First, particle-stabilized emulsions have been fabricated by nucleation and growth of droplets upon cooling from the…
We study the effects of campaigning, where the society is partitioned into voter clusters and a diffusion process propagates opinions in a network connecting the clusters. Our model is very powerful and can incorporate many campaigning…
Digital democracy and new forms for direct digital participation in policy making gain unprecedented momentum. This is particularly the case for preferential voting methods and decision-support systems designed to promote fairer, more…
Much research has been done on studying the diffusion of ideas or technologies on social networks including the \textit{Influence Maximization} problem and many of its variations. Here, we investigate a type of inverse problem. Given a…