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We introduce the heterogeneous voter model (HVM), in which each agent has its own intrinsic rate to change state, reflective of the heterogeneity of real people, and the partisan voter model (PVM), in which each agent has an innate and…
Facebook is flooded by diverse and heterogeneous content, from kittens up to music and news, passing through satirical and funny stories. Each piece of that corpus reflects the heterogeneity of the underlying social background. In the…
Popularity of content in social media is unequally distributed, with some items receiving a disproportionate share of attention from users. Predicting which newly-submitted items will become popular is critically important for both hosts of…
The pervasive use of social media provides massive data about individuals' online social activities and their social relations. The building block of most existing recommendation systems is the similarity between users with social…
The growing ubiquity of Social Media data offers an attractive perspective for improving the quality of machine learning-based models in several fields, ranging from Computer Vision to Natural Language Processing. In this paper we focus on…
Forecasting the popularity of new songs has become a standard practice in the music industry and provides a comparative advantage for those that do it well. Considerable efforts were put into machine learning prediction models for that…
As the sociological theory of homophily suggests, people tend to interact with those of similar preferences. Motivated by this well-established phenomenon, today's online sellers, such as Amazon,~seek~to learn a new buyer's private…
Elections involving a very large voter population often lead to outcomes that surprise many. This is particularly important for the elections in which results affect the economy of a sizable population. A better prediction of the true…
Ensuring privacy of users of social networks is probably an unsolvable conundrum. At the same time, an informed use of the existing privacy options by the social network participants may alleviate - or even prevent - some of the more…
Polarization in American politics has been extensively documented and analyzed for decades, and the phenomenon became all the more apparent during the 2016 presidential election, where Trump and Clinton depicted two radically different…
Political misinformation, particularly harmful when it aligns with individuals' preexisting beliefs and political ideologies, has become widespread on social media platforms. In response, platforms like Facebook and X introduced warning…
Political campaigns are increasingly turning to digital advertising to reach voters. These platforms empower advertisers to target messages to platform users with great precision, including through inferences about those users' political…
Facebook News Feed personalization algorithm has a significant impact, on a daily basis, on the lifestyle, mood and opinion of millions of Internet users. Nonetheless, the behavior of such algorithms usually lacks transparency, motivating…
Information spread in social media depends on a number of factors, including how the site displays information, how users navigate it to find items of interest, users' tastes, and the `virality' of information, i.e., its propensity to be…
In multiple-question referendum elections, the separability problem occurs when a voter's preferences on some questions or proposals depend on the predicted outcomes of others. The notion of separability formalizes the study of…
Homophily describes the phenomenon that similarity breeds connection, i.e., individuals tend to form ties with other people who are similar to themselves in some aspect(s). The similarity in music taste can undoubtedly influence who we make…
A recently proposed graph-theoretic metric, the influence gap, has shown to be a reliable predictor of the effect of social influence in two-party elections, albeit only tested on regular and scale-free graphs. Here, we investigate whether…
Many online social networks thrive on automatic sharing of friends' activities to a user through activity feeds, which may influence the user's next actions. However, identifying such social influence is tricky because these activities are…
In many real world situations, collective decisions are made using voting and, in scenarios such as committee or board elections, employing voting rules that return multiple winners. In multi-winner approval voting (AV), an agent submits a…
Can we design artificial intelligence (AI) systems that rank our social media feeds to consider democratic values such as mitigating partisan animosity as part of their objective functions? We introduce a method for translating established,…