Related papers: Emergence of online communities: Empirical evidenc…
Human populations exhibit complex behaviors---characterized by long-range correlations and surges in activity---across a range of social, political, and technological contexts. Yet it remains unclear where these collective behaviors come…
The spontaneous formation and subsequent growth, dissolution, merger and competition of social groups bears similarities to physical phase transitions in metastable finite systems. We examine three different scenarios, percolation, spinodal…
Contemporary social media networks can be viewed as a break to the early two-step flow model in which influential individuals act as intermediaries between the media and the public for information diffusion. Today's social media platforms…
Recent years have seen a growing interest in the modeling and simulation of social networks to understand several social phenomena. Two important classes of networks, small world and scale free networks have gained a lot of research…
Online communities develop unique characteristics, establish social norms, and exhibit distinct dynamics among their members. Activity in online communities often results in concrete ``off-line'' actions with a broad societal impact (e.g.,…
The massive amounts of data that social media generates has facilitated the study of online human behavior on a scale unimaginable a few years ago. At the same time, the much discussed apparent randomness with which people interact online…
Quantifying human group dynamics represents a unique challenge. Unlike animals and other biological systems, humans form groups in both real (offline) and virtual (online) spaces -- from potentially dangerous street gangs populated mostly…
We study the evolution of a random weighted network with complex nonlinear dynamics at each node, whose activity may cease as a result of interactions with other nodes. Starting from a knowledge of the micro-level behaviour at each node, we…
Ever since the web began, the number of websites has been growing exponentially. These websites cover an ever-increasing range of online services that fill a variety of social and economic functions across a growing range of industries. Yet…
Communities are not static; they evolve, split and merge, appear and disappear, i.e. they are product of dynamical processes that govern the evolution of the network. A good algorithm for community detection should not only quantify the…
Over the last two decades, network science has greatly advanced our understanding of how the collective behaviors of a complex system emerge from the interactions among its basic units. Multiplex networks, i.e. networks with many layers,…
Online communities have increased in size and importance dramatically over the last decade. The fact that many communities are online means that it is possible to extract information about these communities and the connections between their…
Large-scale interacting human activities underlie all social and economic phenomena, but quantitative understanding of regular patterns and mechanism is very challenging and still rare. Self-organized online collaborative activities with…
Lurking is a complex user-behavioral phenomenon that occurs in all large-scale online communities and social networks. It generally refers to the behavior characterizing users that benefit from the information produced by others in the…
Large-scale quantitative analyses have shown that individuals frequently talk to each other about similar things in different online spaces. Why do these overlapping communities exist? We provide an answer grounded in the analysis of 20…
Models of cooperation grounded on social networks and on the ability of individuals to choose actions and partners aim to describe human social behavior. Extensive computer simulations of these models give important insight in the social…
Online communities are important organizational forms where members socialize and share information. Curiously, different online communities often overlap considerably in topic and membership. Recent research has investigated competition…
We present a new model of the evolutionary dynamics and the growth of on-line social networks. The model emulates people's strategies for acquiring information in social networks, emphasising the local subjective view of an individual and…
Public opinion is often affected by the presence of committed groups of individuals dedicated to competing points of view. Using a model of pairwise social influence, we study how the presence of such groups within social networks affects…
How self-organized networks develop, mature and degenerate is a key question for sociotechnical, cyberphysical and biological systems with potential applications from tackling violent extremism through to neurological diseases. So far, it…