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Theoretical work on sequential choice and large-scale experiments in online ranking and voting systems has demonstrated that social influence can have a drastic impact on social and technological systems. Yet, the effect of social influence…
Understanding true influence in social media requires distinguishing correlation from causation--particularly when analyzing misinformation spread. While existing approaches focus on exposure metrics and network structures, they often fail…
A two-dimensional small-world type network, subject to spatial prisoners' dilemma dynamics and containing an influential node defined as a special node with a finite density of directed random links to the other nodes in the network, is…
We propose a modified Vicsek-like model to study influence dynamics and opinion formation in social networks. We work on the premise that opinions of members of a group may be considered to be analogous to the direction of motion of a…
Online social networks are often subject to influence campaigns by malicious actors through the use of automated accounts known as bots. We consider the problem of detecting bots in online social networks and assessing their impact on the…
The global dynamics of event cascades are often governed by the local dynamics of peer influence. However, detecting social influence from observational data is challenging due to confounds like homophily and practical issues like missing…
Consensus, synchronization, formation control, and power grid balance are all examples of virtuous dynamical states that may arise in networks. Here, we focus on how such states can be destabilized from a fundamental perspective; namely, we…
The goal of this project is to create and study novel techniques to identify early warning signals for socially disruptive events, like riots, wars, or revolutions using only publicly available data on social media. Such techniques need to…
Economic competition and deregulation have led to a polarization of societies between a small, increasingly powerful elite and a majority of socially excluded individuals, marginalized and unconnected to political representations. This is…
Detecting influential users, called the influence maximization problem on social networks, is an important graph mining problem with many diverse applications such as information propagation, market advertising, and rumor controlling. There…
We present and analyze a model of opinion formation on an arbitrary network whose dynamics comes from a global energy function. We study the global and local minimizers of this energy, which we call stable opinion configurations, and…
Digital communication has made the public discourse considerably more complex, and new actors and strategies have emerged as a result of this seismic shift. Aside from the often-studied interactions among individuals during opinion…
Hate speech on online platforms has been credibly linked to multiple instances of real world violence. This calls for an urgent need to understand how toxic content spreads and how it might be mitigated on online social networks, and…
In social and biological systems, the structural heterogeneity of interaction networks gives rise to the emergence of a small set of influential nodes, or influencers, in a series of dynamical processes. Although much smaller than the…
The increased use of online social networks for the dissemination of information comes with the misuse of the internet for cyberbullying, cybercrime, spam, vandalism, amongst other things. To proactively identify abuse in the networks, we…
Online social networks are used to diffuse opinions and ideas among users, enabling a faster communication and a wider audience. The way in which opinions are conditioned by social interactions is usually called social influence. Social…
Studies on social networks have proved that endogenous and exogenous factors influence dynamics. Two streams of modeling exist on explaining the dynamics of social networks: 1) models predicting links through network properties, and 2)…
We study the problem of analyzing influence of various factors affecting individual messages posted in social media. The problem is challenging because of various types of influences propagating through the social media network that act…
In recent years networks have gained unprecedented attention in studying a broad range of topics, among them in complex systems research. In particular, multi-agent systems have seen an increased recognition of the importance of the…
In order to truly understand how social media might shape online discourses or contribute to societal polarization, we need refined models of platform choice, that is: models that help us understand why users prefer one social media…