arXiv subjects

Patrick Park

Publications and source records attributed to Patrick Park.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

The Strength of Weak Ties Between Open-Source Developers

In a real-world social network, weak ties (reflecting low-intensity, infrequent interactions) act as bridges and connect people to different social circles, giving them access to diverse information and opportunities that are not available within one's immediate, close-knit vicinity. Weak ties can be crucial for creativity and innovation, as they introduce ideas and approaches that people can then combine in novel ways, leading to innovative solutions. Do weak ties facilitate creativity in software in similar ways? This paper suggests that the answer is "yes." Concretely, we study the correlation between developers' knowledge acquisition through three distinct interaction networks on GitHub and the innovativeness of the projects they develop, across over 37,000 Python projects hosted on GitHub. Our findings suggest that the topical diversity of projects in which developers engage, rather than the volume, correlates positively with the innovativeness of their future code. Notably, exposure through weak interactions (e.g., starring) emerges as a stronger predictor of future novelty than via strong ones (e.g., committing)

cs.SE↗

arXiv2017

The Opacity Problem in Social Contagion

Fads, product adoption, mobs, rumors, memes, and emergent norms are diverse social contagions that have been modeled as network cascades. Empirical study of these cascades is vulnerable to what we describe as the "opacity problem": the inability to observe the critical level of peer influence required to trigger an individual's behavioral change. Even with maximal information, network cascades reveal intervals that bound critical levels of peer exposure, rather than critical values themselves. Existing practice uses interval maxima, which systematically over-estimates the social influence required for behavioral change. Simulations reveal that the over-estimation is likely common and large in magnitude. This is confirmed by an empirical study of hashtag cascades among 3.2 million Twitter users: one in five hashtag adoptions suffers critical value uncertainty due to the opacity problem. Different assumptions about these intervals lead to qualitatively different conclusions about the role of peer reinforcement in diffusion. We introduce a solution that combines identifying tightly bounded intervals with predicting uncertain critical values using node-level information.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2013

The Mesh of Civilizations and International Email Flows

In The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington argued that the primary axis of global conflict was no longer ideological or economic but cultural and religious, and that this division would characterize the "battle lines of the future." In contrast to the "top down" approach in previous research focused on the relations among nation states, we focused on the flows of interpersonal communication as a bottom-up view of international alignments. To that end, we mapped the locations of the world's countries in global email networks to see if we could detect cultural fault lines. Using IP-geolocation on a worldwide anonymized dataset obtained from a large Internet company, we constructed a global email network. In computing email flows we employ a novel rescaling procedure to account for differences due to uneven adoption of a particular Internet service across the world. Our analysis shows that email flows are consistent with Huntington's thesis. In addition to location in Huntington's "civilizations," our results also attest to the importance of both cultural and economic factors in the patterning of inter-country communication ties.

cs.SI↗