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Modern technology has drastically changed the way we interact and consume information. For example, online social platforms allow for seamless communication exchanges at an unprecedented scale. However, we are still bounded by cognitive and…
Unlike many complex networks studied in the literature, social networks rarely exhibit unanimous behavior, or consensus. This requires a development of mathematical models that are sufficiently simple to be examined and capture, at the same…
In this paper we propose a novel control approach for opinion dynamics on evolving networks. The controls modify the strength of connections in the network, rather than influencing opinions directly, with the overall goal of steering the…
Recently, social phenomena have received a lot of attention not only from social scientists, but also from physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists, in the emerging interdisciplinary field of complex system science. Opinion…
Personalized content on social platforms can exacerbate negative phenomena such as polarization, partly due to the feedback interactions between recommendations and the users. In this paper, we present a control-theoretic recommender system…
The emerging social network platforms enable users to share their own opinions, as well as to exchange opinions with others. However, adversarial network perturbation, where malicious users intentionally spread their extreme opinions,…
Investigation of social influence dynamics requires mathematical models that are "simple" enough to admit rigorous analysis, and yet sufficiently "rich" to capture salient features of social groups. Thus, the mechanism of iterative opinion…
Online information ecosystems are now central to our everyday social interactions. Of the many opportunities and challenges this presents, the capacity for artificial agents to shape individual and collective human decision-making in such…
Social power quantifies the ability of individuals to influence others and plays a central role in social influence networks. Yet, computing social power typically requires global knowledge and significant computational or storage…
For decades, researchers have been trying to understand how people form their opinions. This quest has become even more pressing with the widespread usage of online social networks and social media, which seem to amplify the already…
The heterogeneity of the influence processes is an important feature of social systems: how we perceive social influence and how we influence other individuals is heavily influenced by our opinion and non-opinion attributes. The latter…
We consider the design of external inputs to achieve a control objective on the opinions, represented by scalars, in a social network. The opinion dynamics follow a variant of the discrete-time Friedkin-Johnsen model. We first consider two…
Online social networks provide a medium for citizens to form opinions on different societal issues, and a forum for public discussion. They also expose users to viral content, such as breaking news articles. In this paper, we study the…
To obtain a foundational understanding of timeline algorithms and viral content in shaping public opinions, computer scientists started to study augmented versions of opinion formation models from sociology. In this paper, we generalize the…
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 bulk of the literature on opinion optimization in social networks adopts the Friedkin-Johnsen (FJ) opinion dynamics model, in which the innate opinions of all nodes are known: this is an unrealistic assumption. In this paper, we study…
In this work we are interested in the modelling and control of opinion dynamics spreading on a time evolving network with scale-free asymptotic degree distribution. The mathematical model is formulated as a coupling of an opinion alignment…
In many domains of life, business and management, numerous problems are addressed by small groups of individuals engaged in face-to-face discussions. While research in social psychology has a long history of studying the determinants of…
Sustainable technologies and services can play a pivotal role in the transition to "greener" habits. Their widespread adoption is thus crucial, and understanding how to foster this phenomenon in a systematic way could have a major impact on…
Public opinion is subject to peer interaction via social networks and external pressure from the media, advertising, and other actors. In this paper, we study the interaction between external and peer influence on the stochastic opinion…