Related papers: Information flow reveals prediction limits in onli…
Fads, product adoption, mobs, rumors, memes, and emergent norms are diverse social contagions that have been modeled as network cascades. Empirical study of these cascades is vulnerable to what we describe as the "opacity problem": the…
The rise of social media provides a great opportunity for people to reach out to their social connections to satisfy their information needs. However, generic social media platforms are not explicitly designed to assist information seeking…
The dynamics of technological, economic and social phenomena is controlled by how humans organize their daily tasks in response to both endogenous and exogenous stimulations. Queueing theory is believed to provide a generic answer to…
Social media users post content on various topics. A defining feature of social media is that other users can provide feedback -- called community feedback -- to their content in the form of comments, replies, and retweets. We hypothesize…
With the advancement of web technology and its growth, there is a huge volume of data present in the web for internet users and a lot of data is generated too. Internet has become a platform for online learning, exchanging ideas and sharing…
In theory, a major advantage to the big data approach in studying online communities is that it should be possible to collect a representative random sample from a broadly defined population. However, in practice, data collection processes…
To investigate the role of information flow in group formation, we introduce a model of communication and social navigation. We let agents gather information in an idealized network society, and demonstrate that heterogeneous groups can…
Social behaviors are often contagious, spreading through a population as individuals imitate the decisions and choices of others. A variety of global phenomena, from innovation adoption to the emergence of social norms and political…
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…
Predicting how a user responds to news events enables important applications such as allowing intelligent agents or content producers to estimate the effect on different communities and revise unreleased messages to prevent unexpected bad…
In communication networks structure and dynamics are tightly coupled. The structure controls the flow of information and is itself shaped by the dynamical process of information exchanged between nodes. In order to reconcile structure and…
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…
As online social networks continue to be commonly used for the dissemination of information to the public, understanding the phenomena that govern information diffusion is crucial for many security and safety-related applications, such as…
Inferring socioeconomic attributes of social media users such as occupation and income is an important problem in computational social science. Automated inference of such characteristics has applications in personalised recommender…
There has been much effort on studying how social media sites, such as Twitter, help propagate information in different situations, including spreading alerts and SOS messages in an emergency. However, existing work has not addressed how to…
Influence maximization is the problem of selecting a set of influential users in the social network. Those users could adopt the product and trigger a large cascade of adoptions through the " word of mouth " effect. In this paper, we…
As breaking news unfolds people increasingly rely on social media to stay abreast of the latest updates. The use of social media in such situations comes with the caveat that new information being released piecemeal may encourage rumours,…
Individuals' access to information in a social network depends on its distributed and where in the network individuals position themselves. However, individuals have limited capacity to manage their social connections and process…
Over the past century, personality theory and research has successfully identified core sets of characteristics that consistently describe and explain fundamental differences in the way people think, feel and behave. Such characteristics…
Online social networks are growing and becoming denser. The social connections of a given person may have very high variability: from close friends and relatives to acquaintances to people who hardly know. Inferring the strength of social…