Related papers: Can Network Theory-based Targeting Increase Techno…
Addressing global challenges often involves stimulating the large-scale adoption of new products or behaviors. Research traditions that focus on individual decision making suggest that achieving this objective requires identifying the…
Measuring close proximity interactions between individuals can provide key information on social contacts in human communities. With the present study, we report the quantitative assessment of contact patterns in a village in rural Malawi,…
How does social network structure amplify or stifle behavior diffusion? Existing theory suggests that when social reinforcement makes the adoption of behavior more likely, it should spread more -- both farther and faster -- on clustered…
Increasing cultivated lands, crop homogenization and global food trade have fostered the spread of crop pests and diseases. Optimizing crop protection is urgently needed to ensure food safety. One aspect of crop protection is surveillance,…
Only a fast and global transformation towards decarbonization and sustainability can keep the Earth in a civilization-friendly state. As hotspots for (green) innovation and experimentation, cities could play an important role in this…
Network structure can affect when and how widely new ideas, products, and behaviors are adopted. In widely-used models of biological contagion, interventions that randomly rewire edges (on average making them "longer") accelerate spread.…
Behavioral adoptions are influenced by peers in different ways. While some individuals may change after a single incoming influence, others need multiple cumulated attempts. These two mechanism, known as the simple and the complex…
Multilayer networks are the underlying structures of multiple real-world systems where we have more than one type of interaction/relation between nodes: social, biological, computer, or communication, to name only a few. In many cases, they…
The spread of ideas across a social network can be studied using complex contagion models, in which agents are activated by contact with multiple activated neighbors. The investigation of complex contagions can provide crucial insights into…
It has recently become possible to study the dynamics of information diffusion in techno-social systems at scale, due to the emergence of online platforms, such as Twitter, with millions of users. One question that systematically recurs is…
We study the effectiveness of using multiple phases for maximizing the extent of information diffusion through a social network, and present insights while considering various aspects. In particular, we focus on the independent cascade…
This work is aimed at studying realistic social control strategies for social networks based on the introduction of random information into the state of selected driver agents. Deliberately exposing selected agents to random information is…
The spread of socially-learnt behaviours occurs in many animal species, and understanding how behaviours spread can provide novel insights into the causes and consequences of sociality. Within wild populations, behaviour spread is often…
The spread of ideas, behaviors, and technologies generally depends on feedback mechanisms operating across multiple scales. Previous studies have extensively examined pairwise transmission and local reinforcement. However, the role of…
Motivated by applications to word-of-mouth advertising, we consider a game-theoretic scenario in which competing advertisers want to target initial adopters in a social network. Each advertiser wishes to maximize the resulting cascade of…
Seeding strategies for influence maximization in social networks have been studied for more than a decade. They have mainly relied on the activation of all resources (seeds) simultaneously in the beginning; yet, it has been shown that…
The diffusion of new technologies is crucial for the realization of social and economic returns to innovation. Tracking and mapping technology diffusion is, however, typically limited by the extent to which we can observe technology…
Contagion processes on networks, including disease spreading, information diffusion, or social behaviors propagation, can be modeled as simple contagion, i.e. involving one connection at a time, or as complex contagion, in which multiple…
To provide sustainable digital agro-advisory services to farmers, seamless flow of information from the farmers to the experts/expert systems, and vice versa is required. The query generated by the farmers, which may contain multimedia data…
Complex contagion adoption dynamics are characterised by a node being more likely to adopt after multiple network neighbours have adopted. We show how to construct multi-type branching processes to approximate complex contagion adoption…