150 research outputs found
Emergent Behavior in Cybersecurity
We argue that emergent behavior is inherent to cybersecurity.Comment: 2 pages, HotSoS'2014 (2014 Symposium and Bootcamp on the Science of
Security
Discrete-time Markov chain approach to contact-based disease spreading in complex networks
Many epidemic processes in networks spread by stochastic contacts among their
connected vertices. There are two limiting cases widely analyzed in the physics
literature, the so-called contact process (CP) where the contagion is expanded
at a certain rate from an infected vertex to one neighbor at a time, and the
reactive process (RP) in which an infected individual effectively contacts all
its neighbors to expand the epidemics. However, a more realistic scenario is
obtained from the interpolation between these two cases, considering a certain
number of stochastic contacts per unit time. Here we propose a discrete-time
formulation of the problem of contact-based epidemic spreading. We resolve a
family of models, parameterized by the number of stochastic contact trials per
unit time, that range from the CP to the RP. In contrast to the common
heterogeneous mean-field approach, we focus on the probability of infection of
individual nodes. Using this formulation, we can construct the whole phase
diagram of the different infection models and determine their critical
properties.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures. Europhys Lett (in press 2010
Information is not a Virus, and Other Consequences of Human Cognitive Limits
The many decisions people make about what to pay attention to online shape
the spread of information in online social networks. Due to the constraints of
available time and cognitive resources, the ease of discovery strongly impacts
how people allocate their attention to social media content. As a consequence,
the position of information in an individual's social feed, as well as explicit
social signals about its popularity, determine whether it will be seen, and the
likelihood that it will be shared with followers. Accounting for these
cognitive limits simplifies mechanics of information diffusion in online social
networks and explains puzzling empirical observations: (i) information
generally fails to spread in social media and (ii) highly connected people are
less likely to re-share information. Studies of information diffusion on
different social media platforms reviewed here suggest that the interplay
between human cognitive limits and network structure differentiates the spread
of information from other social contagions, such as the spread of a virus
through a population.Comment: accepted for publication in Future Interne
Activity driven modeling of time varying networks
Network modeling plays a critical role in identifying statistical
regularities and structural principles common to many systems. The large
majority of recent modeling approaches are connectivity driven. The structural
patterns of the network are at the basis of the mechanisms ruling the network
formation. Connectivity driven models necessarily provide a time-aggregated
representation that may fail to describe the instantaneous and fluctuating
dynamics of many networks. We address this challenge by defining the activity
potential, a time invariant function characterizing the agents' interactions
and constructing an activity driven model capable of encoding the instantaneous
time description of the network dynamics. The model provides an explanation of
structural features such as the presence of hubs, which simply originate from
the heterogeneous activity of agents. Within this framework, highly dynamical
networks can be described analytically, allowing a quantitative discussion of
the biases induced by the time-aggregated representations in the analysis of
dynamical processes.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure
Disease spread over randomly switched large-scale networks
In this paper we study disease spread over a randomly switched network, which
is modeled by a stochastic switched differential equation based on the so
called -intertwined model for disease spread over static networks. Assuming
that all the edges of the network are independently switched, we present
sufficient conditions for the convergence of infection probability to zero.
Though the stability theory for switched linear systems can naively derive a
necessary and sufficient condition for the convergence, the condition cannot be
used for large-scale networks because, for a network with agents, it
requires computing the maximum real eigenvalue of a matrix of size exponential
in . On the other hand, our conditions that are based also on the spectral
theory of random matrices can be checked by computing the maximum real
eigenvalue of a matrix of size exactly
Spreading Processes over Socio-Technical Networks with Phase-Type Transmissions
Most theoretical tools available for the analysis of spreading processes over
networks assume exponentially distributed transmission and recovery times. In
practice, the empirical distribution of transmission times for many real
spreading processes, such as the spread of web content through the Internet,
are far from exponential. To bridge this gap between theory and practice, we
propose a methodology to model and analyze spreading processes with arbitrary
transmission times using phase-type distributions. Phase-type distributions are
a family of distributions that is dense in the set of positive-valued
distributions and can be used to approximate any given distributions. To
illustrate our methodology, we focus on a popular model of spreading over
networks: the susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) networked model. In the
standard version of this model, individuals informed about a piece of
information transmit this piece to its neighbors at an exponential rate. In
this paper, we extend this model to the case of transmission rates following a
phase-type distribution. Using this extended model, we analyze the dynamics of
the spread based on a vectorial representations of phase-type distributions. We
illustrate our results by analyzing spreading processes over networks with
transmission and recovery rates following a Weibull distribution
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