Social Networks

Authors: Giovanna Miritello, Esteban Moro y Rubén Lara Journal: Physical Review E (Rapid Comm) 83, 045102 (2011). LINK | arXiv Abstract: We investigate the temporal patterns of human communication and its influence on the spreading of information in social networks. The analysis of mobile phone calls of 20 million people in one country shows that human communication is bursty and happens in group conversations. These features have opposite effects in information reach: while bursts hinder propagation at large scales, conversations favor local rapid cascades. ...

Each day trillions of emails, phone calls, comments on blogs, twitter messages, exchanges in online social networks, etc. are done. Not only the number of communications has increased, but also each of these transactions leaves a digital trace that can be recorded to reconstruct our high-frequency human activity. It is not only the amount and variety of data that is recorded what is important. Also its high-frequency character and its comprehensive nature have allowed researchers, companies and agencies to investigate individual and group dynamics at an unprecedented level of detail and applied them to client modeling, organizational analysis or epidemic spreading [1]. ...

Authors: J. L. Iribarren and E. Moro Journal: Physical Review Letters 103, 038702 (2009) LINK arXiv Abstract: We study the impact of human activity patterns on information diffusion. To this end we ran a viral email experiment involving 31183 individuals in which we were able to track a specific piece of information through the social network. We found that, contrary to traditional models, information travels at an unexpectedly slow pace. By using a branching model which accurately describes the experiment, we show that the large heterogeneity found in the response time is responsible for the slow dynamics of information at the collective level. ...

In the old days, research quality was measured by the number of papers you published. Publishing was a hard process and only few scientists were able to publish several papers per year. However, with the bloom of new journals, the appearance of electronic editorial process, and the specialization of research fields, the number of publications per year has grow exponentially during the last decades. Thus publishing is not longer a good measure of the quality of research. ...

Authors: José Luis Iribarren, Esteban Moro Journal: Preprint 0706.0641 arXiv Abstract: The dynamics of information dissemination in social networks is of paramount importance in processes such as rumors or fads propagation, spread of product innovations or “word-of-mouth” communications. Due to the difficulty in tracking a specific information when it is transmitted by people, most understanding of information spreading in social networks comes from models or indirect measurements. Here we present an integrated experimental and theoretical framework to understand and quantitatively predict how and when information spreads over social networks. ...