Social Networks

Authors: Marcin Waniek, Kai Zhou, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, Esteban Moro, Tomasz P Michalak, Talal Rahwan Journal: Scientific Reports volume 9, Article number: 12208 (2019) Link Abstract: Our private connections can be exposed by link prediction algorithms. To date, this threat has only been addressed from the perspective of a central authority, completely neglecting the possibility that members of the social network can themselves mitigate such threats. We fill this gap by studying how an individual can rewire her own network neighborhood to hide her sensitive relationships. ...

Article (in Spanish) in the spanish newspaper El País about how many people we will know in our life. This is a summary of our recent research on how humans create/destroy relationships and how narrow and small is our world even throughout a life of encounters, relationships, work, etc. ¿Cuánta gente vas a acabar conociendo en toda tu vida? Muy poca En el mundo hay más de 7.500 millones de personas. ...

We live in a networked society and our actions, opinions, behaviors are affected and can affect other people. Understanding such social networked structures is one of the key challenges in our attempt to decode human behavior and its impact in our society. Although human interactions are dynamical by nature, most of our understanding relies in static representations of those social networks. However, social interactions are rarely static. Very often the networks evolve by means of processes that happen at diverse time scales, like link decay/formation, group formation, etc. ...

I started using Twitter more than 10 years ago (!). I open an account in this social network in 2008 and although I was not using it too much for the first year, I become a frequent user after that. It has helped me to get news, information both for my personal and professional interests. But not only that, Twitter has been also the data source for our research, that helped us to investigate the relationship between human behavior in the social platform and paramount problems in our society as information propagation, unemployment, disaster damage, political opinion. ...

Video of my talk “The lifetime of strong ties in social networks” at the Northwestern Institute of Complex Systems (NICO) in Evaston, Chicago, Oct 2017. What a great experience giving a talk at NICO!

Authors: Henry Navarro, Giovanna Miritello, Arturo Canales, Esteban Moro Journal: EPJ Data Science (2017) 6:31 LINK Abstract: Social networks are made out of strong and weak ties having very different structural and dynamical properties. But what features of human interaction build a strong tie? Here we approach this question from a practical way by finding what are the properties of social interactions that make ties more persistent and thus stronger to maintain social interactions in the future. ...