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Predicting human displacements is crucial for addressing various societal challenges, including urban design, traffic congestion, epidemic management, and migration dynamics. While predictive models like deep learning and Markov models…
With the growth of user-generated content, we observe the constant rise of the number of companies, such as search engines, content aggregators, etc., that operate with tremendous amounts of web content not being the services hosting it.…
How do humans respond to indirect social influence when making decisions? We analysed an experiment where subjects had to repeatedly guess the correct answer to factual questions, while having only aggregated information about the answers…
Crowd movement guidance has been a fascinating problem in various fields, such as easing traffic congestion in unusual events and evacuating people from an emergency-affected area. To grab the reins of crowds, there has been considerable…
People's collectively shared beliefs can have significant social implications, including on democratic processes and policies. Unfortunately, as people interact with peers to form and update their beliefs, various cognitive and social…
The wide use of social media sites and other digital technologies have resulted in an unprecedented availability of digital data that are being used to study human behavior across research domains. Although unsolicited opinions and…
Recommender systems recommend objects regardless of potential adverse effects of their overcrowding. We address this shortcoming by introducing crowd-avoiding recommendation where each object can be shared by only a limited number of users…
Recent research has unveiled the importance of online social networks for improving the quality of recommender systems and encouraged the research community to investigate better ways of exploiting the social information for…
Researchers have used social media data to estimate various macroeconomic indicators about public behaviors, mostly as a way to reduce surveying costs. One of the most widely cited economic indicator is consumer confidence index (CCI).…
Every day, we judge the probability of propositions. When we communicate graded confidence (e.g. "I am 90% sure"), we enable others to gauge how much weight to attach to our judgment. Ideally, people should share their judgments to reach…
Humans have a powerful and mysterious capacity to reason. Working through a set of mental steps enables us to make inferences we would not be capable of making directly even though we get no additional data from the world. Similarly, when…
Societal events shape the Internet's behavior. The death of a prominent public figure, a software launch, or a major sports match can trigger sudden demand surges that overwhelm peering points and content delivery networks. Although these…
The problem of "approximating the crowd" is that of estimating the crowd's majority opinion by querying only a subset of it. Algorithms that approximate the crowd can intelligently stretch a limited budget for a crowdsourcing task. We…
Milgram empirically showed that people knowing only connections to their friends could locate any person in the U.S. in a few steps. Later research showed that social network topology enables a node aware of its full routing to find an…
A book's success/popularity depends on various parameters - extrinsic and intrinsic. In this paper, we study how the book reading characteristics might influence the popularity of a book. Towards this objective, we perform a cross-platform…
Human activities increasingly take place in online environments, providing novel opportunities for relating individual behaviours to population-level outcomes. In this paper, we introduce a simple generative model for the collective…
Information sharing dynamics of social networks rely on a small set of influencers to effectively reach a large audience. Our recent results and observations demonstrate that the shape and identity of this elite, especially those…
Predicting the future direction of community evolution is a problem with high theoretical and practical significance. It allows to determine which characteristics describing communities have importance from the point of view of their future…
We explore different aspects of cognitive diversity and its effect on the success of group deliberation. To evaluate this, we use 500 dialogues from small, online groups discussing the Wason Card Selection task - the DeliData corpus.…
Data on hundreds of variables related to individual consumer finance behavior (such as credit card and loan activity) is routinely collected in many countries and plays an important role in lending decisions. We postulate that the detailed…