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arXiv2014

Twitter in Academic Conferences: Usage, Networking and Participation over Time

Twitter is often referred to as a backchannel for conferences. While the main conference takes place in a physical setting, attendees and virtual attendees socialize, introduce new ideas or broadcast information by microblogging on Twitter. In this paper we analyze the scholars' Twitter use in 16 Computer Science conferences over a timespan of five years. Our primary finding is that over the years there are increasing differences with respect to conversation use and information use in Twitter. We studied the interaction network between users to understand whether assumptions about the structure of the conversations hold over time and between different types of interactions, such as retweets, replies, and mentions. While `people come and people go', we want to understand what keeps people stay with the conference on Twitter. By casting the problem to a classification task, we find different factors that contribute to the continuing participation of users to the online Twitter conference activity. These results have implications for research communities to implement strategies for continuous and active participation among members.

cs.SI↗
arXiv2014

Keep Your Friends Close and Your Facebook Friends Closer: A Multiplex Network Approach to the Analysis of Offline and Online Social Ties

Social media allow for an unprecedented amount of interaction between people online. A fundamental aspect of human social behavior, however, is the tendency of people to associate themselves with like-minded individuals, forming homogeneous social circles both online and offline. In this work, we apply a new model that allows us to distinguish between social ties of varying strength, and to observe evidence of homophily with regards to politics, music, health, residential sector & year in college, within the online and offline social network of 74 college students. We present a multiplex network approach to social tie strength, here applied to mobile communication data - calls, text messages, and co-location, allowing us to dimensionally identify relationships by considering the number of communication channels utilized between students. We find that strong social ties are characterized by maximal use of communication channels, while weak ties by minimal use. We are able to identify 75% of close friendships, 90% of weaker ties, and 90% of Facebook friendships as compared to reported ground truth. We then show that stronger ties exhibit greater profile similarity than weaker ones. Apart from high homogeneity in social circles with respect to political and health aspects, we observe strong homophily driven by music, residential sector and year in college. Despite Facebook friendship being highly dependent on residence and year, exposure to less homogeneous content can be found in the online rather than the offline social circles of students, most notably in political and music aspects.

cs.SI↗
arXiv2014

Topics in social network analysis and network science

This chapter introduces statistical methods used in the analysis of social networks and in the rapidly evolving parallel-field of network science. Although several instances of social network analysis in health services research have appeared recently, the majority involve only the most basic methods and thus scratch the surface of what might be accomplished. Cutting-edge methods using relevant examples and illustrations in health services research are provided.

physics.soc-ph↗
arXiv2014

Comparative Resilience Notions and Vertex Attack Tolerance of Scale-Free Networks

We are concerned with an appropriate mathematical measure of resilience in the face of targeted node attacks for arbitrary degree networks, and subsequently comparing the resilience of different scale-free network models with the proposed measure. We strongly motivate our resilience measure termed \emph{vertex attack tolerance} (VAT), which is denoted mathematically as $τ(G) = \min_{S \subset V} \frac{|S|}{|V-S-C_{max}(V-S)|+1}$, where $C_{max}(V-S)$ is the largest connected component in $V-S$. We attempt a thorough comparison of VAT with several existing resilience notions: conductance, vertex expansion, integrity, toughness, tenacity and scattering number. Our comparisons indicate that for artbitrary degree distributions VAT is the only measure that fully captures both the major \emph{bottlenecks} of a network and the resulting \emph{component size distribution} upon targeted node attacks (both captured in a manner proportional to the size of the attack set). For the case of $d$-regular graphs, we prove that $τ(G) \le dΦ(G)$, where $Φ(G)$ is the conductance of the graph $G$. Conductance and expansion are well-studied measures of robustness and bottlenecks in the case of regular graphs but fail to capture resilience in the case of highly heterogeneous degree graphs. Regarding comparison of different scale-free graph models, our experimental results indicate that PLOD graphs with degree distributions identical to BA graphs of the same size exhibit consistently better vertex attack tolerance than the BA type graphs, although both graph types appear asymptotically resilient for BA generative parameter $m = 2$. BA graphs with $m = 1$ also appear to lack resilience, not only exhibiting very low VAT values, but also great transparency in the identification of the vulnerable node sets, namely the hubs, consistent with well known previous work.

cs.SI↗
arXiv2014

Gender Asymmetries in Reality and Fiction: The Bechdel Test of Social Media

The subjective nature of gender inequality motivates the analysis and comparison of data from real and fictional human interaction. We present a computational extension of the Bechdel test: A popular tool to assess if a movie contains a male gender bias, by looking for two female characters who discuss about something besides a man. We provide the tools to quantify Bechdel scores for both genders, and we measure them in movie scripts and large datasets of dialogues between users of MySpace and Twitter. Comparing movies and users of social media, we find that movies and Twitter conversations have a consistent male bias, which does not appear when analyzing MySpace. Furthermore, the narrative of Twitter is closer to the movies that do not pass the Bechdel test than to those that pass it. We link the properties of movies and the users that share trailers of those movies. Our analysis reveals some particularities of movies that pass the Bechdel test: Their trailers are less popular, female users are more likely to share them than male users, and users that share them tend to interact less with male users. Based on our datasets, we define gender independence measurements to analyze the gender biases of a society, as manifested through digital traces of online behavior. Using the profile information of Twitter users, we find larger gender independence for urban users in comparison to rural ones. Additionally, the asymmetry between genders is larger for parents and lower for students. Gender asymmetry varies across US states, increasing with higher average income and latitude. This points to the relation between gender inequality and social, economical, and cultural factors of a society, and how gender roles exist in both fictional narratives and public online dialogues.

cs.SI↗
arXiv2014

The diffusion dynamics of choice: From durable goods markets to fashion first names

Goods, styles, ideologies are adopted by society through various mechanisms. In particular, adoption driven by innovation is extensively studied by marketing economics. Mathematical models are currently used to forecast the sales of innovative goods. Inspired by the theory of diffusion processes developed for marketing economics, we propose, for the first time, a predictive framework for the mechanism of fashion, which we apply to first names. Analyses of French, Dutch and US national databases validate our modelling approach for thousands of first names, covering, on average, more than 50% of the yearly incidence in each database. In these cases, it is thus possible to forecast how popular the first names will become and when they will run out of fashion. Furthermore, we uncover a clear distinction between popularity and fashion: less popular names, typically not included in studies of fashion, may be driven by fashion, as well.

physics.soc-ph↗
arXiv2014

Modelling the Self-similarity in Complex Networks Based on Coulomb's Law

Recently, self-similarity of complex networks have attracted much attention. Fractal dimension of complex network is an open issue. Hub repulsion plays an important role in fractal topologies. This paper models the repulsion among the nodes in the complex networks in calculation of the fractal dimension of the networks. The Coulomb's law is adopted to represent the repulse between two nodes of the network quantitatively. A new method to calculate the fractal dimension of complex networks is proposed. The Sierpinski triangle network and some real complex networks are investigated. The results are illustrated to show that the new model of self-similarity of complex networks is reasonable and efficient.

cs.SI↗
arXiv2014

Synchronization of nearly-identical dynamical systems. II Optimized networks

In this paper we use the master stability function (MSF) for nearly identical dynamical systems obtained in the previous paper to construct optimized networks (ONs) which show better synchronizability. Nearly identical nature is the result of having some node dependent parameters (NDPs) in the dynamics. We study the correlation between various network properties and the values of NDPs on different nodes for the optimized networks and compare them with random networks using the example of coupled Rössler systems. In an ON, the nodes with NDP values at one extreme, e.g. nodes with higher frequencies in coupled Rössler systems, have higher degrees and are chosen as hubs. These nodes also show higher betweenness centrality. The links in ON are preferably between nodes with large differences in NDP values. The ONs have in general higher clustering coefficient. We also study other network properties such as average shortest path, degree mixing etc. and their relation to the NDP in ON. We consider cases of both one and two NDPs and also directed networks.

nlin.CD↗
arXiv2014

You are What you Eat (and Drink): Identifying Cultural Boundaries by Analyzing Food & Drink Habits in Foursquare

Food and drink are two of the most basic needs of human beings. However, as society evolved, food and drink became also a strong cultural aspect, being able to describe strong differences among people. Traditional methods used to analyze cross-cultural differences are mainly based on surveys and, for this reason, they are very difficult to represent a significant statistical sample at a global scale. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to identify cultural boundaries and similarities across populations at different scales based on the analysis of Foursquare check-ins. This approach might be useful not only for economic purposes, but also to support existing and novel marketing and social applications. Our methodology consists of the following steps. First, we map food and drink related check-ins extracted from Foursquare into users' cultural preferences. Second, we identify particular individual preferences, such as the taste for a certain type of food or drink, e.g., pizza or sake, as well as temporal habits, such as the time and day of the week when an individual goes to a restaurant or a bar. Third, we show how to analyze this information to assess the cultural distance between two countries, cities or even areas of a city. Fourth, we apply a simple clustering technique, using this cultural distance measure, to draw cultural boundaries across countries, cities and regions.

cs.SI↗
arXiv2014

Studying Social Networks at Scale: Macroscopic Anatomy of the Twitter Social Graph

Twitter is one of the largest social networks using exclusively directed links among accounts. This makes the Twitter social graph much closer to the social graph supporting real life communications than, for instance, Facebook. Therefore, understanding the structure of the Twitter social graph is interesting not only for computer scientists, but also for researchers in other fields, such as sociologists. However, little is known about how the information propagation in Twitter is constrained by its inner structure. In this paper, we present an in-depth study of the macroscopic structure of the Twitter social graph unveiling the highways on which tweets propagate, the specific user activity associated with each component of this macroscopic structure, and the evolution of this macroscopic structure with time for the past 6 years. For this study, we crawled Twitter to retrieve all accounts and all social relationships (follow links) among accounts; the crawl completed in July 2012 with 505 million accounts interconnected by 23 billion links. Then, we present a methodology to unveil the macroscopic structure of the Twitter social graph. This macroscopic structure consists of 8 components defined by their connectivity characteristics. Each component group users with a specific usage of Twitter. For instance, we identified components gathering together spammers, or celebrities. Finally, we present a method to approximate the macroscopic structure of the Twitter social graph in the past, validate this method using old datasets, and discuss the evolution of the macroscopic structure of the Twitter social graph during the past 6 years.

cs.SI↗
arXiv2014

Revealing the structure of the world airline network

Resilience of most critical infrastructures against failure of elements that appear insignificant is usually taken for granted. The World Airline Network (WAN) is an infrastructure that reduces the geographical gap between societies, both small and large, and brings forth economic gains. With the extensive use of a publicly maintained data set that contains information about airports and alternative connections between these airports, we empirically reveal that the WAN is a redundant and resilient network for long distance air travel, but otherwise breaks down completely due to removal of short and apparently insignificant connections. These short range connections with moderate number of passengers and alternate flights are the connections that keep remote parts of the world accessible. It is surprising, insofar as there exists a highly resilient and strongly connected core consisting of a small fraction of airports (around 2.3%) together with an extremely fragile star-like periphery. Yet, in spite of their relevance, more than 90% of the world airports are still interconnected upon removal of this core. With standard and unconventional removal measures we compare both empirical and topological perceptions for the fragmentation of the world. We identify how the WAN is organized into different classes of clusters based on the physical proximity of airports and analyze the consequence of this fragmentation.

physics.soc-ph↗
arXiv2014

Optimal Budget Allocation in Social Networks: Quality or Seeding

In this paper, we study a strategic model of marketing and product consumption in social networks. We consider two competing firms in a market providing two substitutable products with preset qualities. Agents choose their consumptions following a myopic best response dynamics which results in a local, linear update for the consumptions. At some point in time, firms receive a limited budget which they can use to trigger a larger consumption of their products in the network. Firms have to decide between marginally improving the quality of their products and giving free offers to a chosen set of agents in the network in order to better facilitate spreading their products. We derive a simple threshold rule for the optimal allocation of the budget and describe the resulting Nash equilibrium. It is shown that the optimal allocation of the budget depends on the entire distribution of centralities in the network, quality of products and the model parameters. In particular, we show that in a graph with a higher number of agents with centralities above a certain threshold, firms spend more budget on seeding in the optimal allocation. Furthermore, if seeding budget is nonzero for a balanced graph, it will also be nonzero for any other graph, and if seeding budget is zero for a star graph, it will be zero for any other graph too. We also show that firms allocate more budget to quality improvement when their qualities are close, in order to distance themselves from the rival firm. However, as the gap between qualities widens, competition in qualities becomes less effective and firms spend more budget on seeding.

cs.SI↗
arXiv2014

Note de lecture: 'Climat: 15 vérités qui dérangent'

This is a critical review of the book 'Climat: 15 vérités qui dérangent', under the scientific supervision of Pr Itsvan Markó, and co-authored by Anne Debeil, Ludovic Delory, Samuel Furfari, Drieu Godefridi, Henri Masson, Lars Myren, and Alain Préat. We show that regarding climate science, the book contains too many approximations or mistakes to be considered seriously. Nevertheless, the book is interesting in several aspects, in particular from an epistemological perspective. We also argue that the main take-home message is not stated clearly enough by the authors: there is a strong practical incompatibility between economic \emph{laissez-faire} and anthropogenic climate change. ----- Ceci est une analyse du livre 'Climat: 15 vérités qui dérangent', publié par un collectif sous la direction scientifique du Pr Itsvan Markó et incluant Anne Debeil, Ludovic Delory, Samuel Furfari, Drieu Godefridi, Henri Masson, Lars Myren, et Alain Préat. Nous montrons qu'au sujet de la science du climat, le livre contient trop d'approximations ou d'erreurs pour être pris au sérieux. Le livre est cependant intéressant pour d'autres aspects, en particulier d'un point de vue épistémologique. Nous insistons sur l'information principale du livre, qui n'est pas exprimée assez clairement par les auteurs: il y a une forte incompatibilité pratique entre la croyance en l'efficacité du marché libre et la théorie scientifique du changement climatique anthropique.

physics.soc-ph↗
arXiv2014

Optimizing The Selection of Strangers To Answer Questions in Social Media

Millions of people express themselves on public social media, such as Twitter. Through their posts, these people may reveal themselves as potentially valuable sources of information. For example, real-time information about an event might be collected through asking questions of people who tweet about being at the event location. In this paper, we explore how to model and select users to target with questions so as to improve answering performance while managing the load on people who must be asked. We first present a feature-based model that leverages users exhibited social behavior, including the content of their tweets and social interactions, to characterize their willingness and readiness to respond to questions on Twitter. We then use the model to predict the likelihood for people to answer questions. To support real-world information collection applications, we present an optimization-based approach that selects a proper set of strangers to answer questions while achieving a set of application-dependent objectives, such as achieving a desired number of answers and minimizing the number of questions to be sent. Our cross-validation experiments using multiple real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our work.

cs.SI↗
arXiv2014

A signature of power law network dynamics

Can one hear the 'sound' of a growing network? We address the problem of recognizing the topology of evolving biological or social networks. Starting from percolation theory, we analytically prove a linear inverse relationship between two simple graph parameters--the logarithm of the average cluster size and logarithm of the ratio of the edges of the graph to the theoretically maximum number of edges for that graph--that holds for all growing power law graphs. The result establishes a novel property of evolving power-law networks in the asymptotic limit of network size. Numerical simulations as well as fitting to real-world citation co-authorship networks demonstrate that the result holds for networks of finite sizes, and provides a convenient measure of the extent to which an evolving family of networks belongs to the same power-law class.

q-bio.QM↗
arXiv2014

The Dynamics of Emotional Chats with Bots: Experiment and Agent-Based Simulations

Quantitative research of emotions in psychology and machine-learning methods for extracting emotion components from text messages open an avenue for physical science to explore the nature of stochastic processes in which emotions play a role, e.g., in human dynamics online. Here, we investigate the occurrence of collective behavior of users that is induced by chats with emotional Bots. The Bots, designed in an experimental environment, are considered. Furthermore, using the agent-based modeling approach, the activity of these experimental Bots is simulated within a social network of interacting emotional agents. Quantitative analysis of time series carrying emotional messages by agents suggests temporal correlations and persistent fluctuations with clustering according to emotion similarity. {All data used in this study are fully anonymized.}

cs.SI↗