Social Networks

Authors: Manuel Garcia-Herranz, Esteban Moro, Manuel Cebrian, Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler Journal: PLoS ONE 9(4): e92413 (2014) LINK SummaryRecent research has focused on the monitoring of global–scale online data for improved detection of epidemics, mood patterns, movements in the stock market political revolutions, box-office revenues, consumer behaviour and many other important phenomena. However, privacy considerations and the sheer scale of data available online are quickly making global monitoring infeasible, and existing methods do not take full advantage of local network structure to identify key nodes for monitoring. ...

Authors: Yury Kryvasheyeu, Haohui Chen, Esteban Moro, Pascal Van Hentenryck, Manuel Cebrian Journal: PLoS ONE 10(2): e0117288 (2015) LINK Summary Information flow during catastrophic events is a critical aspect of disaster management. Modern communication platforms, in particular online social networks, provide an opportunity to study such flow, and a mean to derive early-warning sensors, improving emergency preparedness and response. Performance of the social networks sensor method, based on topological and behavioural properties derived from the “friendship paradox”, is studied here for over 50 million Twitter messages posted before, during, and after Hurricane Sandy. ...

Authors: Giovanna Miritello, Rubén Lara, and Esteban Moro Book: “Temporal Networks”, Springer, 2013. Series: Understanding Complex Systems. Holme, Petter; Saramaki, Jari (Eds.) [PDF]((http://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.3865v1.pdf) Summary Recent research has shown the deep impact of the dynamics of human interactions (or temporal social networks) on the spreading of information, opinion formation, etc. In general, the bursty nature of human interactions lowers the interaction between people to the extent that both the speed and reach of information diffusion are diminished. ...

Authors: Alex Rutherford, Manuel Cebrian, Sohan Dsouza, Esteban Moro, Alex Pentland, and Iyad Rahwan Journal: PNAS 110 (16), 6281-6286 (2013) LINK Abstract: The Internet and social media have enabled the mobilization of large crowds to achieve time-critical feats, ranging from mapping crises in real time, to organizing mass rallies, to conducting search-and-rescue operations over large geographies. Despite significant success, selection bias may lead to inflated expectations of the efficacy of social mobilization for these tasks. ...

Authors: Giovanna Miritello, Esteban Moro, Rubén Lara, Rocío Martínez-López, Sam G. B. Roberts, Robin I. M. Dunbar Journal: Social Networks 35, 89 (2013) LINK | arXiv Abstract: We used a large database of 9 billion calls from 20 million mobile users to examine the relationships between aggregated time spent on the phone, personal network size, tiestrength and the way in which users distributed their limited time across their network (disparity). Compared to those with smaller networks, those with large networks did not devote proportionally more time to communication and had on average weaker ties (as measured by time spent communicating). ...

Millions of tweets, retweets and mentions are exchanged in Twitter everyday about very different subjects, events, opinions, etc. While aggregating this data over a time window might help to understand some properties of those processes in online social networks, the speed of information diffusion around particular time-bound events requires a temporal analysis of them. To show that (and with the help of the Text & Opinion Mining Group at IIC) we collected all tweets (750k) of the vibrant conversation around the disputed subject of the general strike of March 29th in Spain. ...