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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…
Modifiable health behaviors, a leading cause of illness and death in many countries, are often driven by individual beliefs and sentiments about health and disease. Individual behaviors affecting health outcomes are increasingly modulated…
To address the vaccine hesitancy which impairs the efforts of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, it is imperative to understand public vaccination attitudes and timely grasp their changes. In spite of reliability and trustworthiness,…
Public health surveillance systems often fail to detect emerging infectious diseases, particularly in resource limited settings. By integrating relevant clinical and internet-source data, we can close critical gaps in coverage and…
Social networking and micro-blogging services, such as Twitter, play an important role in sharing digital information. Despite the popularity and usefulness of social media, there have been many instances where corrupted users found ways to…
Interpersonal influence estimation from empirical data is a central challenge in the study of social structures and dynamics. Opinion dynamics theory is a young interdisciplinary science that studies opinion formation in social networks and…
Exploring online behavior change is imperative for societal progress in the context of 21st-century challenges. We analyze 148 articles (2000-2023) focusing on behavior change in the digital space and build a map that categorizes behaviors,…
Research in population and public health focuses on the mechanisms between different cultural, social, and environmental factors and their effect on the health, of not just individuals, but communities as a whole. We present here a very…
The power of digital platforms is at the center of major ongoing policy and regulatory efforts. To advance existing debates, we designed and executed an experiment to measure the performative power of online search providers. Instantiated…
Internet data has surfaced as a primary source for investigation of different aspects of human behavior. A crucial step in such studies is finding a suitable cohort (i.e., a set of users) that shares a common trait of interest to…
Artificial intelligence systems are now deployed at scale across sectors, accompanied by a growing number of real-world incidents ranging from misinformation and cybercrime to autonomous-system failures. Databases of AI incidents index…
There is an increasing number of virtual communities and forums available on the web. With social media, people can freely communicate and share their thoughts, ask personal questions, and seek peer-support, especially those with conditions…
Many years after online social networks exceeded our collective attention, social influence is still built on attention capital. Quality is not a prerequisite for viral spreading, yet large diffusion cascades remain the hallmark of a social…
Protecting interventions of many types (both pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical) can be deployed against the spreading of a communicable disease, as the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically shown. Here we investigate in detail…
Social influence is the process by which individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behavior as a result of social interactions with other people. In our strongly interconnected society, social influence plays a…
Influenza, an infectious disease, causes many deaths worldwide. Predicting influenza victims during epidemics is an important task for clinical, hospital, and community outbreak preparation. On-line user-generated contents (UGC), primarily…
This paper describes an agent-based model of epidemics dynamics. This model is willingly simplified, as its goal is not to predict the evolution of the epidemics, but to explain the underlying mechanisms in an interactive way. This model…
Many Artificial Intelligence systems depend on the agent's updating its beliefs about the world on the basis of experience. Experiments constitute one type of experience, so scientific methodology offers a natural environment for examining…
Social media platforms are thriving nowadays, so a huge volume of data is produced. As it includes brief and clear statements, millions of people post their thoughts on microblogging sites every day. This paper represents and analyze the…
"Social sensing" is a form of crowd-sourcing that involves systematic analysis of digital communications to detect real-world events. Here we consider the use of social sensing for observing natural hazards. In particular, we present a case…