A Survey on Centrality Metrics and Their Implications in Network Resilience

Centrality metrics have been used in various networks, such as communication, social, biological, geographic, or contact networks. In particular, they have been used in order to study and analyze targeted attack behaviors and investigated their effect on network resilience. Although a rich volume of centrality metrics has been developed for decades, a limited set of centrality metrics have been commonly in use. This paper aims to introduce various existing centrality metrics and discuss their applicabilities and performance based on the results obtained from extensive simulation experiments to encourage their use in solving various computing and engineering problems in networks.Comment: Main paper: 36 pages, 2 figures. Appendix 23 pages,45 figure

Effects of Gatekeeping on the Diffusion of Information

This study proposes a theoretical model of information diffusion using the conceptual framework of Gatekeeping Theory (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). Diffusion is a process by which elements are distributed through a social system (Rogers, 2003; Kadushin, 2012). This model builds on previous diffusion research and incorporates constructs of authority and vivid information, novel to the domain. To test the fit of the model, Twitter data derived using data mining techniques are utilized. Specifically, messages posted to Twitter relating to the 2013 Consumer Electronics (CES) conference are mined. Essentially, this study focuses on the diffusion of technology information through a popular social medium, Twitter. From these messages, the network was be visualized and diffusion paths were determined using network analysis. A test of the model was conducted to determine fit using structural equation modeling

Social Cohesion, Structural Holes, and a Tale of Two Measures

EMBARGOED - author can archive pre-print or post-print on any open access repository after 12 months from publication. Publication date is May 2013 so embargoed until May 2014.This is an author’s accepted manuscript (deposited at arXiv arXiv:1211.0719v2 [physics.soc-ph] ), which was subsequently published in Journal of Statistical Physics May 2013, Volume 151, Issue 3-4, pp 745-764. The final publication is available at link.springer.com http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10955-013-0722-

MULTIMEDIA SOCIAL NETWORKS

Nowadays, On-Line Social Networks represent an interactive platform to share -- and very often interact with -- heterogeneous content for different purposes (e.g to comment events and facts, express and share personal opinions on specific topics, and so on), allowing millions of individuals to create on-line profiles and communicate personal information. In this dissertation, we define a novel data model for Multimedia Social Networks (MSNs), i.e. social networks that combine information on users -- belonging to one or more social communities -- with the multimedia content that is generated and used within the related environments. The proposed data model, inspired by hypergraph-based approaches, allows to represent in a simple way all the different kinds of relationships that are typical of these environments (among multimedia contents, among users and multimedia content and among users themselves) and to enable several kinds of analytics and applications. Exploiting the feature of MSN model, the following two main challenging problems have been addressed: the Influence Maximization and the Community Detection. Regarding the first problem, a novel influence diffusion model has been proposed that, learning recurrent user behaviors from past logs, estimates the probability that a given user can influence the other ones, basically exploiting user to content actions. On the top of this model, several algorithms (based on game theory, epidemiological etc.) have been developed to address the Influence Maximization problem. Concerning the second challenge, we propose an algorithm that leverages both user interactions and multimedia content in terms of high and low-level features for identifying communities in heterogeneous network. Finally, experimental analysis have been made on a real Multimedia Social Network ("Flickr") for evaluating both the feasibility of the model and the effectiveness of the proposed approaches for Influence Maximization and community detection