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In recent years, social media has become a ubiquitous and integral part of social networking. One of the major attentions made by social researchers is the tendency of like-minded people to interact with one another in social groups, a…
Recently, there has been significant interest in social influence analysis. One of the central problems in this area is the problem of identifying influencers, such that by convincing these users to perform a certain action (like buying a…
Many see modern science as having serious defects, intellectual, social, moral. Few see this as having anything to do with the philosophy of science. I argue that many diverse ills of modern science are a consequence of the fact that the…
Social media's role in the spread and evolution of extremism is a focus of intense study. Online extremists have been involved in the dissemination of online hate, mis- and disinformation, and real-world violence. While the majority of…
Although the gender gap in academia has narrowed, females are underrepresented within some fields in the USA. Prior research suggests that the imbalances between science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields may be partly due to…
This essay addresses the implications of integrated information theory (IIT) for free will. IIT is a theory of what consciousness is and what it takes to have it. According to IIT, the presence of consciousness is accounted for by a maximum…
Social media and data mining are increasingly being used to analyse political and societal issues. Here we undertake the classification of social media users as supporting or opposing ongoing independence movements in their territories.…
Understanding the forces governing human behavior and social dynamics is a challenging problem. Individuals' decisions and actions are affected by interlaced factors, such as physical location, homophily, and social ties. In this paper, we…
The growing need to manage and exploit the proliferation of online data sources is opening up new opportunities for bringing people closer to the resources they need. For instance, consider a recommendation service through which researchers…
Single-cell analysis is currently one of the most high-resolution techniques to study biology. The large complex datasets that have been generated have spurred numerous developments in computational biology, in particular the use of…
Influence Maximization Problem (IMP) is selecting a seed set of nodes in the social network to spread the influence as widely as possible. It has many applications in multiple domains, e.g., viral marketing is frequently used for new…
Valid empirical studies build confidence in scientific findings. Fortunately, it is now common for software engineering researchers to consider threats to validity when designing their studies and to discuss them as part of their…
We study the emergence of support for Donald Trump in Reddit's political discussion. With almost 800k subscribers, "r/The_Donald" is one of the largest communities on Reddit, and one of the main hubs for Trump supporters. It was created in…
Fringe communities promoting conspiracy theories and extremist ideologies have thrived on mainstream platforms, raising questions about the mechanisms driving their growth. Here, we hypothesize and study a possible mechanism: new members…
Cultural trends and popularity cycles can be observed all around us, yet our theories of social influence and identity expression do not explain what perpetuates these complex, often unpredictable social dynamics. We propose a theory of…
Homophily -- our tendency to surround ourselves with others who share our perspectives and opinions about the world -- is both a part of human nature and an organizing principle underpinning many of our digital social networks. However,…
Understanding the emergence of inequality in complex systems requires attention to both structural dynamics and intrinsic heterogeneity. In the context of opinion dynamics, traditional models relied on static snapshots or assumed…
One of the most interesting scientific challenges nowadays deals with the analysis and the understanding of complex networks' dynamics. A major issue is the definition of new frameworks for the exploration of the dynamics at play in real…
The structure and the properties of complex networks essentially depend on the way how nodes get connected to each other. We assume here that each node has a feature which attracts the others. We model the situation by assigning two numbers…
As the demand for interpretable machine learning approaches continues to grow, there is an increasing necessity for human involvement in providing informative explanations for model decisions. This is necessary for building trust and…