47,616 research outputs found
Critical size of ego communication networks
With the help of information and communication technologies, studies on the
overall social networks have been extensively reported recently. However,
investigations on the directed Ego Communication Networks (ECNs) remain
insufficient, where an ECN stands for a sub network composed of a centralized
individual and his/her direct contacts. In this paper, the directed ECNs are
built on the Call Detail Records (CDRs), which cover more than 7 million people
of a provincial capital city in China for half a year. Results show that there
is a critical size for ECN at about 150, above which the average emotional
closeness between ego and alters drops, the balanced relationship between ego
and network collapses, and the proportion of strong ties decreases. This paper
not only demonstrate the significance of ECN size in affecting its properties,
but also shows accordance with the "Dunbar's Number". These results can be
viewed as a cross-culture supportive evidence to the well-known Social Brain
Hypothesis (SBH).Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl
Enabling Social Applications via Decentralized Social Data Management
An unprecedented information wealth produced by online social networks,
further augmented by location/collocation data, is currently fragmented across
different proprietary services. Combined, it can accurately represent the
social world and enable novel socially-aware applications. We present
Prometheus, a socially-aware peer-to-peer service that collects social
information from multiple sources into a multigraph managed in a decentralized
fashion on user-contributed nodes, and exposes it through an interface
implementing non-trivial social inferences while complying with user-defined
access policies. Simulations and experiments on PlanetLab with emulated
application workloads show the system exhibits good end-to-end response time,
low communication overhead and resilience to malicious attacks.Comment: 27 pages, single ACM column, 9 figures, accepted in Special Issue of
Foundations of Social Computing, ACM Transactions on Internet Technolog
Dissemination of Health Information within Social Networks
In this paper, we investigate, how information about a common food born
health hazard, known as Campylobacter, spreads once it was delivered to a
random sample of individuals in France. The central question addressed here is
how individual characteristics and the various aspects of social network
influence the spread of information. A key claim of our paper is that
information diffusion processes occur in a patterned network of social ties of
heterogeneous actors. Our percolation models show that the characteristics of
the recipients of the information matter as much if not more than the
characteristics of the sender of the information in deciding whether the
information will be transmitted through a particular tie. We also found that at
least for this particular advisory, it is not the perceived need of the
recipients for the information that matters but their general interest in the
topic
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