社会与信息网络
With the increasing use of smartphones, instant messaging platforms turned into important communication tools. According to WhatsApp, more than 100 billion messages are sent each day on the app. Communication on these platforms has allowed…
The COVID-19 pandemic that emerged in 2020 has highlighted the complex interplay between vaccine hesitancy and societal polarization. In this study, we analyse the dynamical polarization within a social network as well as the network…
Political leaning can be defined as the inclination of an individual towards certain political orientations that align with their personal beliefs. Political leaning inference has traditionally been framed as a binary classification…
Information-based attacks on social media, such as disinformation campaigns and propaganda, are emerging cybersecurity threats. The security community has focused on countering these threats on social media platforms like X and Reddit.…
Social media users express their political preferences via interaction with other users, by spontaneous declarations or by participation in communities within the network. This makes a social network such as Twitter a valuable data source…
In 1907, Sir Francis Galton independently asked 787 villagers to estimate the weight of an ox. Although none of them guessed the exact weight, the average estimate was remarkably accurate. This phenomenon is known as wisdom of crowds. In a…
In 2024, half of the global population is expected to participate in elections, offering researchers a unique opportunity to study online information diffusion and user behavior. This study investigates the media landscape on social media…
Online platforms host a diverse user base, which can be broadly categorized into "specialist users" with focused interests and "generalist users" who engage in a wide range of topics. This study explores the behavioral differences between…
The ability to simulate realistic networks based on empirical data is an important task across scientific disciplines, from epidemiology to computer science. Often simulation approaches involve selecting a suitable network generative model…
Traditional social learning frameworks consider environments with a homogeneous state, where each agent receives observations conditioned on that true state of nature. In this work, we relax this assumption and study the distributed…
COVID-19 as a global pandemic causes a massive disruption to social stability that threatens human life and the economy. Policymakers and all elements of society must deliver measurable actions based on the pandemic's severity to minimize…
Scientific collaboration is a significant behavior in knowledge creation and idea exchange. To tackle large and complex research questions, a trend of team formation has been observed in recent decades. In this study, we focus on…
Graph Neural Network (GNN) resembles the diffusion process, leading to the over-smoothing of learned representations when stacking many layers. Hence, the reverse process of message passing can produce the distinguishable node…
For U.S. presidential elections, most states use the so-called winner-take-all system, in which the state's presidential electors are awarded to the winning political party in the state after a popular vote phase, regardless of the actual…
A job usually involves the application of several complementary or synergistic skills to perform its required tasks. Such relationships are implicitly recognised by employers in the skills they demand when recruiting new employees. Here we…
Community detection techniques are useful for social media platforms to discover tightly connected groups of users who share common interests. However, this functionality often comes at the expense of potentially exposing individuals to…
We present a simple and quick method to approximate network centrality indexes. Our approach, called QuickCent, is inspired by so-called fast and frugal heuristics, which are heuristics initially proposed to model some human decision and…
Digital collaborative platforms have become crucial venues of career advancement and individual success in many creative fields, from engineering to the arts. Indirect gender discrimination is a key component to gendered disadvantage on…
Detecting counterfeits on online marketplaces is challenging, and current methods struggle with the volume of sales on platforms like eBay, while cryptomarkets openly sell counterfeits. Leveraging information from 453 cryptomarket…
Community detection (CD) is a classic graph inference task that partitions nodes of a graph into densely connected groups. While many CD methods have been proposed with either impressive quality or efficiency, balancing the two aspects…