Related papers: COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy and Information Diffusi…
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic reminded us how vaccination can be a divisive topic on which the public conversation is permeated by misleading claims, and thoughts tend to polarize, especially on online social networks. In this work, motivated by…
Enumerated threat agent lists have long driven biodefense priorities. The global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic demonstrated the limitations of searching for known threat agents as compared to a more agnostic approach. Recent technological advances…
We study spreading processes in two-dimensional systems of heterogeneous active agents that exhibit different individual active speeds. We obtain, combining kinetic and complex network theory, an analytical expression for the spreading…
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, fears grew that making vaccination a political (instead of public health) issue may impact the efficacy of this life-saving intervention, spurring the spread of vaccine-hesitant content. In this…
Given limited supply of approved vaccines and constrained medical resources, design of a vaccination strategy to control a pandemic is an economic problem. We use time-series and panel methods with real-world country-level data to estimate…
A large scale agent-based model of common Facebook users was designed to develop an understanding of the underlying mechanism of information diffusion within online social networks at a micro-level analysis. The agent-based model network…
Vaccine adverse events have been presumed to be a relatively objective measure that is immune to political polarization. The real-world data, however, shows the correlation between presidential disapproval ratings and the subjective…
With significant population fractions in many societies who refuse vaccines, it is important to reconsider how vaccination is incorporated into compartmental epidemiology models. It is still most common to apply the vaccination rate to the…
The spread of disinformation (maliciously spread false information) in online social networks has become an important problem in today's society. Disinformation's spread is facilitated by the fact that individuals often accept false…
This study uses agent-based modeling to examine the impact of various recommendation algorithms on the propagation of misinformation on online social networks. We simulate a synthetic environment consisting of heterogeneous agents,…
Anti-vaccine sentiments have been well-known and reported throughout the history of viral outbreaks and vaccination programmes. The COVID-19 pandemic had fear and uncertainty about vaccines which has been well expressed on social media…
News media has been utilized as a political tool to stray from facts, presenting biased claims without evidence. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, politically biased news (PBN) has significantly undermined public trust in vaccines, despite strong…
Recurrent waves which are often observed during long pandemics typically form as a result of several interrelated dynamics including public health interventions, population mobility and behaviour, varying disease transmissibility due to…
A pandemic poses particular challenges to decision-making because of the need to continuously adapt decisions to rapidly changing evidence and available data. For example, which countermeasures are appropriate at a particular stage of the…
Online attention is an increasingly valuable resource in the digital age, with extraordinary events such as the COVID-19 pandemic fuelling fierce competition around it. As misinformation pervades online platforms, users seek credible…
Agent-based models have proven to be useful tools in supporting decision-making processes in different application domains. The advent of modern computers and supercomputers has enabled these bottom-up approaches to realistically model…
Voluntary vaccination is effective to prevent infectious diseases from spreading. Both vaccination behavior and cognition of the vaccination risk play important roles in individual vaccination decision making. However, it is not clear how…
The paper quantifies the impact of race, poverty, politics, and age on COVID-19 vaccination rates in counties in the continental US. Both, OLS regression analysis and Random Forest machine learning algorithms are applied to quantify factors…
The proliferation of misinformation on social media platforms has highlighted the need to understand how individual personality traits influence susceptibility to and propagation of misinformation. This study employs an innovative…
The Covid-19 pandemic revealed the difficulties of vaccinating a population under the circumstances marked by urgency and limited availability of doses while balancing benefits associated with distinct guidelines satisfying specific ethical…