arXiv subjects

Agostino Funel

Publications and source records attributed to Agostino Funel.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Two Time Scales of Online Discussion: Mixture Distributions of Thread Durations Across Four Reddit Communities

Online discussions vary dramatically in their duration: some fade within minutes, while others persist for days. We analyze 3.5 million threads from four Reddit communities to uncover the statistical patterns governing how long conversations last. We find that thread duration follow a mixture of two distinct regimes -- brief reactions and extended discussions -- coexisting in roughly equal proportions across all communities. The widely-assumed power-law distribution provides a poor description of the data. The prevalence and duration of each regime depend systematically on social factors: more participants lengthen both types of discussion, disagreement between opposing viewpoints extends long conversations, and threads that appear emotionally neutral are in fact the most conflictual -- balanced between opposing factions whose debate sustains prolonged engagement. These structural patterns remain stable over seven years. Our findings establish a robust statistical model for online discussion dynamics and demonstrate that the temporal organization of conversations responds predictably to participation, sentiment, and conflict.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

Kuramoto oscillators in random networks

By means of numerical analysis conducted with the aid of the computer, the collective synchronization of coupled phase oscillators in the Kuramoto model in the connected regime of random networks of various sizes is studied. The oscillators synchronize and achieve phase coherence, and this process is not significantly affected by the level of connectivity of the network. If the probability that two oscillators are coupled is around the network connectivity threshold synchronization still occurs, although in a more attenuated way. If the size of the network is sufficiently large the oscillators have a phase transition.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2021

A method to compute the communicability of nodes through causal paths in temporal networks

We present a method aimed to compute the communicability (broadcast and receive) of nodes through causal paths in temporal networks. The method considers all possible combinations of chronologically ordered products of adjacency matrices of the network snapshots and by means of a damping procedure favors the paths that have high communication efficiency. We apply the method to four real-world networks of face-to-face human contacts and identify the nodes with high communicability. The accuracy of the method is proved by studying the spread of an epidemic in the networks using the susceptible-infected-recovered model. We show that if a node with high broadcast is chosen as the origin of the outbreak of infection then the epidemic spreads early while it is delayed and inhibited if the origin of infection is a node with low broadcast. Receiving nodes can be treated as broadcasters if the arrow of time is reversed.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2020

Causal Paths in Temporal Networks of Face-to-Face Human Interactions

In a temporal network causal paths are characterized by the fact that links from a source to a target must respect the chronological order. In this article we study the causal paths structure in temporal networks of human face to face interactions in different social contexts. In a static network paths are transitive i.e. the existence of a link from $a$ to $b$ and from $b$ to $c$ implies the existence of a path from $a$ to $c$ via $b$. In a temporal network the chronological constraint introduces time correlations that affects transitivity. A probabilistic model based on higher order Markov chains shows that correlations that can invalidate transitivity are present only when the time gap between consecutive events is larger than the average value and are negligible below such a value. The comparison between the densities of the temporal and static accessibility matrices shows that the static representation can be used with good approximation. Moreover, we quantify the extent of the causally connected region of the networks over time.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2019

The Graph Structure of the Internet at the Autonomous Systems Level during Ten Years

We study how the graph structure of the Internet at the Autonomous Systems (AS) level evolved during a decade. For each year of the period 2008-2017 we consider a snapshot of the AS graph and examine how many features related to structure, connectivity and centrality changed over time. The analysis of these metrics provides topological and data traffic information and allows to clarify some assumptions about the models concerning the evolution of the Internet graph structure. We find that the size of the Internet roughly doubled. The overall trend of the average connectivity is an increase over time, while that of the shortest path length is a decrease over time. The internal core of the Internet is composed of a small fraction of big AS and is more stable and connected that external cores. A hierarchical organization emerges where a small fraction of big hubs are connected to many regions with high internal cohesiveness, poorly connected among them and containing AS with low and medium number of links. Centrality measurements indicate that the average number of shortest paths crossing an AS or containing a link between two of them decreased over time.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2018

Analysis of the Web Graph Aggregated by Host and Pay-Level Domain

In this paper the web is analyzed as a graph aggregated by host and pay-level domain (PLD). The web graph datasets, publicly available, have been released by the Common Crawl Foundation and are based on a web crawl performed during the period May-June-July 2017. The host graph has $\sim$1.3 billion nodes and $\sim$5.3 billion arcs. The PLD graph has $\sim$91 million nodes and $\sim$1.1 billion arcs. We study the distributions of degree and sizes of strongly/weakly connected components (SCC/WCC) focusing on power laws detection using statistical methods. The statistical plausibility of the power law model is compared with that of several alternative distributions. While there is no evidence of power law tails on host level, they emerge on PLD aggregation for indegree, SCC and WCC size distributions. Finally, we analyze distance-related features by studying the cumulative distributions of the shortest path lengths, and give an estimation of the diameters of the graphs.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2003

Spacetime Noncommutativity and Antisymmetric Tensor Dynamics in the Early Universe

This paper investigates the possible cosmological implications of the presence of an antisymmetric tensor field related to a lack of commutatitivity of spacetime coordinates at the Planck era. For this purpose, such a field is promoted to a dynamical variable, inspired by tensor formalism. By working to quadratic order in the antisymmetric tensor, we study the field equations in a Bianchi I universe in two models: an antisymmetric tensor plus scalar field coupled to gravity, or a cosmological constant and a free massless antisymmetric tensor. In the first scenario, numerical integration shows that, in the very early universe, the effects of the antisymmetric tensor can prevail on the scalar field, while at late times the former approaches zero and the latter drives the isotropization of the universe. In the second model, an approximate solution is obtained of a nonlinear ordinary differential equation which shows how the mean Hubble parameter and the difference between longitudinal and orthogonal Hubble parameter evolve in the early universe.

gr-qc↗