65 research outputs found
On the influence of social bots in online protests. Preliminary findings of a Mexican case study
Social bots can affect online communication among humans. We study this
phenomenon by focusing on #YaMeCanse, the most active protest hashtag in the
history of Twitter in Mexico. Accounts using the hashtag are classified using
the BotOrNot bot detection tool. Our preliminary analysis suggests that bots
played a critical role in disrupting online communication about the protest
movement.Comment: 10 page
Who Will Retweet This? Automatically Identifying and Engaging Strangers on Twitter to Spread Information
There has been much effort on studying how social media sites, such as
Twitter, help propagate information in different situations, including
spreading alerts and SOS messages in an emergency. However, existing work has
not addressed how to actively identify and engage the right strangers at the
right time on social media to help effectively propagate intended information
within a desired time frame. To address this problem, we have developed two
models: (i) a feature-based model that leverages peoples' exhibited social
behavior, including the content of their tweets and social interactions, to
characterize their willingness and readiness to propagate information on
Twitter via the act of retweeting; and (ii) a wait-time model based on a user's
previous retweeting wait times to predict her next retweeting time when asked.
Based on these two models, we build a recommender system that predicts the
likelihood of a stranger to retweet information when asked, within a specific
time window, and recommends the top-N qualified strangers to engage with. Our
experiments, including live studies in the real world, demonstrate the
effectiveness of our work
Latent Self-Exciting Point Process Model for Spatial-Temporal Networks
We propose a latent self-exciting point process model that describes
geographically distributed interactions between pairs of entities. In contrast
to most existing approaches that assume fully observable interactions, here we
consider a scenario where certain interaction events lack information about
participants. Instead, this information needs to be inferred from the available
observations. We develop an efficient approximate algorithm based on
variational expectation-maximization to infer unknown participants in an event
given the location and the time of the event. We validate the model on
synthetic as well as real-world data, and obtain very promising results on the
identity-inference task. We also use our model to predict the timing and
participants of future events, and demonstrate that it compares favorably with
baseline approaches.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures (v3); 11 pages, 6 figures (v2); previous version
appeared in the 9th Bayesian Modeling Applications Workshop, UAI'1
Emergence of Leadership in Communication
We study a neuro-inspired model that mimics a discussion (or information
dissemination) process in a network of agents. During their interaction, agents
redistribute activity and network weights, resulting in emergence of leader(s).
The model is able to reproduce the basic scenarios of leadership known in
nature and society: laissez-faire (irregular activity, weak leadership, sizable
inter-follower interaction, autonomous sub-leaders); participative or
democratic (strong leadership, but with feedback from followers); and
autocratic (no feedback, one-way influence). Several pertinent aspects of these
scenarios are found as well---e.g., hidden leadership (a hidden clique of
agents driving the official autocratic leader), and successive leadership (two
leaders influence followers by turns). We study how these scenarios emerge from
inter-agent dynamics and how they depend on behavior rules of agents---in
particular, on their inertia against state changes.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figure
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