111,066 research outputs found
Associative nature of event participation dynamics: a network theory approach
The affiliation with various social groups can be a critical factor when it
comes to quality of life of each individual, making such groups an essential
element of every society. The group dynamics, longevity and effectiveness
strongly depend on group's ability to attract new members and keep them engaged
in group activities. It was shown that high heterogeneity of scientist's
engagement in conference activities of the specific scientific community
depends on the balance between the numbers of previous attendances and
non-attendances and is directly related to scientist's association with that
community. Here we show that the same holds for leisure groups of the Meetup
website and further quantify individual members' association with the group. We
examine how structure of personal social networks is evolving with the event
attendance. Our results show that member's increasing engagement in the group
activities is primarily associated with the strengthening of already existing
ties and increase in the bonding social capital. We also show that Meetup
social networks mostly grow trough big events, while small events contribute to
the groups cohesiveness.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figs + Supporting information 7 pages, 8 fig
The Lifecycle and Cascade of WeChat Social Messaging Groups
Social instant messaging services are emerging as a transformative form with
which people connect, communicate with friends in their daily life - they
catalyze the formation of social groups, and they bring people stronger sense
of community and connection. However, research community still knows little
about the formation and evolution of groups in the context of social messaging
- their lifecycles, the change in their underlying structures over time, and
the diffusion processes by which they develop new members. In this paper, we
analyze the daily usage logs from WeChat group messaging platform - the largest
standalone messaging communication service in China - with the goal of
understanding the processes by which social messaging groups come together,
grow new members, and evolve over time. Specifically, we discover a strong
dichotomy among groups in terms of their lifecycle, and develop a separability
model by taking into account a broad range of group-level features, showing
that long-term and short-term groups are inherently distinct. We also found
that the lifecycle of messaging groups is largely dependent on their social
roles and functions in users' daily social experiences and specific purposes.
Given the strong separability between the long-term and short-term groups, we
further address the problem concerning the early prediction of successful
communities. In addition to modeling the growth and evolution from group-level
perspective, we investigate the individual-level attributes of group members
and study the diffusion process by which groups gain new members. By
considering members' historical engagement behavior as well as the local social
network structure that they embedded in, we develop a membership cascade model
and demonstrate the effectiveness by achieving AUC of 95.31% in predicting
inviter, and an AUC of 98.66% in predicting invitee.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, to appear in proceedings of the 25th
International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2016
Power-law weighted networks from local attachments
This letter introduces a mechanism for constructing, through a process of
distributed decision-making, substrates for the study of collective dynamics on
extended power-law weighted networks with both a desired scaling exponent and a
fixed clustering coefficient. The analytical results show that the connectivity
distribution converges to the scaling behavior often found in social and
engineering systems. To illustrate the approach of the proposed framework we
generate network substrates that resemble steady state properties of the
empirical citation distributions of (i) publications indexed by the Institute
for Scientific Information from 1981 to 1997; (ii) patents granted by the U.S.
Patent and Trademark Office from 1975 to 1999; and (iii) opinions written by
the Supreme Court and the cases they cite from 1754 to 2002.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Decision
and Control and the European Control Conference, Orlando, FL, Dec. 2011;
Added references; We modified the model in order to take into account
extended power-law distributions which better fit to the citations data sets;
Added proofs of theorems; Shorten version; Updated plo
Online Popularity and Topical Interests through the Lens of Instagram
Online socio-technical systems can be studied as proxy of the real world to
investigate human behavior and social interactions at scale. Here we focus on
Instagram, a media-sharing online platform whose popularity has been rising up
to gathering hundred millions users. Instagram exhibits a mixture of features
including social structure, social tagging and media sharing. The network of
social interactions among users models various dynamics including
follower/followee relations and users' communication by means of
posts/comments. Users can upload and tag media such as photos and pictures, and
they can "like" and comment each piece of information on the platform. In this
work we investigate three major aspects on our Instagram dataset: (i) the
structural characteristics of its network of heterogeneous interactions, to
unveil the emergence of self organization and topically-induced community
structure; (ii) the dynamics of content production and consumption, to
understand how global trends and popular users emerge; (iii) the behavior of
users labeling media with tags, to determine how they devote their attention
and to explore the variety of their topical interests. Our analysis provides
clues to understand human behavior dynamics on socio-technical systems,
specifically users and content popularity, the mechanisms of users'
interactions in online environments and how collective trends emerge from
individuals' topical interests.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figures, Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 201
Competitive dynamics of lexical innovations in multi-layer networks
We study the introduction of lexical innovations into a community of language
users. Lexical innovations, i.e., new terms added to people's vocabulary, play
an important role in the process of language evolution. Nowadays, information
is spread through a variety of networks, including, among others, online and
offline social networks and the World Wide Web. The entire system, comprising
networks of different nature, can be represented as a multi-layer network. In
this context, lexical innovations diffusion occurs in a peculiar fashion. In
particular, a lexical innovation can undergo three different processes: its
original meaning is accepted; its meaning can be changed or misunderstood
(e.g., when not properly explained), hence more than one meaning can emerge in
the population; lastly, in the case of a loan word, it can be translated into
the population language (i.e., defining a new lexical innovation or using a
synonym) or into a dialect spoken by part of the population. Therefore, lexical
innovations cannot be considered simply as information. We develop a model for
analyzing this scenario using a multi-layer network comprising a social network
and a media network. The latter represents the set of all information systems
of a society, e.g., television, the World Wide Web and radio. Furthermore, we
identify temporal directed edges between the nodes of these two networks. In
particular, at each time step, nodes of the media network can be connected to
randomly chosen nodes of the social network and vice versa. In so doing,
information spreads through the whole system and people can share a lexical
innovation with their neighbors or, in the event they work as reporters, by
using media nodes. Lastly, we use the concept of "linguistic sign" to model
lexical innovations, showing its fundamental role in the study of these
dynamics. Many numerical simulations have been performed.Comment: 23 pages, 19 figures, 1 tabl
- …