Modeling the transmission dynamics of racism propagation with community resilience

Racism spreading can have a vital influence on people’s lives, declining adherence, pretending political views, and recruiters’ socio-economical crisis. Besides, Web 2.0 technologies have democratized the creation and propagation of racist information, which facilitated the rapid spreading of racist messages. In this research work, the impact of community resilience on the spread dynamics of racism was assessed. To investigate the effect of resilience-building, new SERDC mathematical model was formulated and analyzed. The racism spread is under control where $$R_0<1$$ R 0 < 1 , whereas persist in the community whenever $$R_0>1$$ R 0 > 1 . Sensitivity analysis of the parameters value of the model are conducted. The rising of transmission and racial extremeness rate provides the prevalence of racism spread. Effective community resilience decline the damages, mitigate, and eradicate racism propagation. Theoretical analysis of the model are backed up by numerical results. Despite the evidence of numerical simulations, reducing the transmission and racial extremeness rate by improving social bonds and solidarity through community resilience could control the spread of racism.

Contextual polarity and influence mining in online social networks

Crowdsourcing is an emerging tool for collaboration and innovation platforms. Recently, crowdsourcing platforms have become a vital tool for firms to generate new ideas, especially large firms such as Dell, Microsoft, and Starbucks, Crowdsourcing provides firms with multiple advantages, notably, rapid solutions, cost savings, and a variety of novel ideas that represent the diversity inherent within a crowd. The literature on crowdsourcing is limited to empirical evidence of the advantage of crowdsourcing for businesses as an innovation strategy. In this study, Starbucks’ crowdsourcing platform, Ideas Starbucks, is examined, with three objectives: first, to determine crowdsourcing participants’ perception of the company by crowdsourcing participants when generating ideas on the platform. The second objective is to map users into a community structure to identify those more likely to produce ideas; the most promising users are grouped into the communities more likely to generate the best ideas. The third is to study the relationship between the users’ ideas’ sentiment scores and the frequency of discussions among crowdsourcing users. The results indicate that sentiment and emotion scores can be used to visualize the social interaction narrative over time. They also suggest that the fast greedy algorithm is the one best suited for community structure with a modularity on agreeable ideas of 0.53 and 8 significant communities using sentiment scores as edge weights. For disagreeable ideas, the modularity is 0.47 with 8 significant communities without edge weights. There is also a statistically significant quadratic relationship between the sentiments scores and the number of conversations between users.

Fairness norm through social networks: a simulation approach

Recently there has been an increased interest in adopting game-theoretic models to social norms. Most of these approaches are generally lacking a structure linking the local level of the ‘norm’ interaction to its global ‘social’ nature. Although numerous studies examined local-interaction games, where the emphasis is placed on neighborhood relations, regarding social network as a whole unique entity seems to be quite limited. In this paper, we conduct a series of simulation experiments to examine the effects that a network topology could have on the speed of emergence of the social norm. The emphasis is placed on the fairness norm in the ultimatum game context, by considering three network type models (Barabási–Albert, Watts–Strogatz and Erdős–Rényi) and several intrinsic topological properties.

A model for the co-evolution of dynamic social networks and infectious disease dynamics

Recent research shows an increasing interest in the interplay of social networks and infectious diseases. Many studies either neglect explicit changes in health behavior or consider networks to be static, despite empirical evidence that people seek to distance themselves from diseases in social networks. We propose an adaptable steppingstone model that integrates theories of social network formation from sociology, risk perception from health psychology, and infectious diseases from epidemiology. We argue that networking behavior in the context of infectious diseases can be described as a trade-off between the benefits, efforts, and potential harm a connection creates. Agent-based simulations of a specific model case show that: (i) high (perceived) health risks create strong social distancing, thus resulting in low epidemic sizes; (ii) small changes in health behavior can be decisive for whether the outbreak of a disease turns into an epidemic or not; (iii) high benefits for social connections create more ties per agent, providing large numbers of potential transmission routes and opportunities for the disease to travel faster, and (iv) higher costs of maintaining ties with infected others reduce final size of epidemics only when benefits of indirect ties are relatively low. These findings suggest a complex interplay between social network, health behavior, and infectious disease dynamics. Furthermore, they contribute to solving the issue that neglect of explicit health behavior in models of disease spread may create mismatches between observed transmissibility and epidemic sizes of model predictions.

Understanding how retweets influence the behaviors of social networking service users via agent-based simulation

The retweet is a characteristic mechanism of several social network services/social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Weibo. By retweeting tweet, users can share an article with their friends and followers. However, it is not clear how retweets affect the dominant behaviors of users. Therefore, this study investigates the impact of retweets on the behavior of social media users from the perspective of networked game theory, and how the existence of the retweet mechanism in social media promotes or reduces the willingness of users to post and comment on articles. To address these issues, we propose the retweet reward game model and quote tweet reward game model by adding the retweet and quote tweet mechanisms to a relatively simple social networking service model known as the reward game. Subsequently, we conduct simulation-based experiments to understand the influence of retweets on the user behavior on various networks. It is demonstrated that users will be more willing to post new articles with a retweet mechanism, and quote retweets are more beneficial to users, as users can expect to spread their information and their own comments on already posted articles.

A robust optimization model for influence maximization in social networks with heterogeneous nodes

Influence maximization is the problem of trying to maximize the number of influenced nodes by selecting optimal seed nodes, given that influencing these nodes is costly. Due to the probabilistic nature of the problem, existing approaches deal with the concept of the expected number of nodes. In the current research, a scenario-based robust optimization approach is taken to finding the most influential nodes. The proposed robust optimization model maximizes the number of infected nodes in the last step of diffusion while minimizing the number of seed nodes. Nodes, however, are treated as heterogeneous with regard to their propensity to pass messages along; or as having varying activation thresholds. Experiments are performed on a real text-messaging social network. The model developed here significantly outperforms some of the well-known existing heuristic approaches which are proposed in previous works.

Celebrity profiling through linguistic analysis of digital social networks

Digital social networks have become an essential source of information because celebrities use them to share their opinions, ideas, thoughts, and feelings. This makes digital social networks one of the preferred means for celebrities to promote themselves and attract new followers. This paper proposes a model of feature selection for the classification of celebrities profiles based on their use of a digital social network Twitter. The model includes the analysis of lexical, syntactic, symbolic, participation, and complementary information features of the posts of celebrities to estimate, based on these, their demographic and influence characteristics. The classification with these new features has an F1-score of 0.65 in Fame, 0.88 in Gender, 0.37 in Birth year, and 0.57 in Occupation. With these new features, the average accuracy improve up to 0.14 more. As a result, extracted features from linguistic cues improved the performance of predictive models of Fame and Gender and facilitate explanations of the model results. Particularly, the use of the third person singular was highly predictive in the model of Fame.

Link weights recovery in heterogeneous information networks

Socio-technical systems usually consist of many intertwined networks, each connecting different types of objects or actors through a variety of means. As these networks are co-dependent, one can take advantage of this entangled structure to study interaction patterns in a particular network from the information provided by other related networks. A method is, hence, proposed and tested to recover the weights of missing or unobserved links in heterogeneous information networks (HIN)—abstract representations of systems composed of multiple types of entities and their relations. Given a pair of nodes in a HIN, this work aims at recovering the exact weight of the incident link to these two nodes, knowing some other links present in the HIN. To do so, probability distributions resulting from path-constrained random walks, i.e., random walks where the walker is forced to follow only a specific sequence of node types and edge types, capable to capture specific semantics and commonly called a meta-path, are combined in a linearly fashion to approximate the desired result. This method is general enough to compute the link weight between any types of nodes. Experiments on Twitter and bibliographic data show the applicability of the method.

Spheres of legislation: polarization and most influential nodes in behavioral context

Game-theoretic models of influence in networks often assume the network structure to be static. In this paper, we allow the network structure to vary according to the underlying behavioral context. This leads to several interesting questions on two fronts. First, how do we identify different contexts and learn the corresponding network structures using real-world data? We focus on the U.S. Senate and apply unsupervised machine learning techniques, such as fuzzy clustering algorithms and generative models, to identify spheres of legislation as context and learn an influence network for each sphere. Second, how do we analyze these networks to gain an insight into the role played by the spheres of legislation in various interesting constructs like polarization and most influential nodes? To this end, we apply both game-theoretic and social network analysis techniques. In particular, we show that game-theoretic notion of most influential nodes brings out the strategic aspects of interactions like bipartisan grouping, which structural centrality measures fail to capture.

Modelling community structure and temporal spreading on complex networks

We present methods for analysing hierarchical and overlapping community structure and spreading phenomena on complex networks. Different models can be developed for describing static connectivity or dynamical processes on a network topology. In this study, classical network connectivity and influence spreading models are used as examples for network models. Analysis of results is based on a probability matrix describing interactions between all pairs of nodes in the network. One popular research area has been detecting communities and their structure in complex networks. The community detection method of this study is based on optimising a quality function calculated from the probability matrix. The same method is proposed for detecting underlying groups of nodes that are building blocks of different sub-communities in the network structure. We present different quantitative measures for comparing and ranking solutions of the community detection algorithm. These measures describe properties of sub-communities: strength of a community, probability of formation and robustness of composition. The main contribution of this study is proposing a common methodology for analysing network structure and dynamics on complex networks. We illustrate the community detection methods with two small network topologies. In the case of network spreading models, time development of spreading in the network can be studied. Two different temporal spreading distributions demonstrate the methods with three real-world social networks of different sizes. The Poisson distribution describes a random response time and the e-mail forwarding distribution describes a process of receiving and forwarding messages.