Author Correction: Unsupervised Scalable Statistical Method for Identifying Influential Users in Online Social Networks (Scientific Reports, (2018), 8, 1, (6955), 10.1038/s41598-018-24874-2)

The original version of this Article contained an error in Affiliation 3, which was incorrectly given as ‘Department of Mathematical Sciences, Universidad EAFIT, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Medellín, Colombia’. The correct affiliation is listed below: Department of Mathematical Sciences, Universidad EAFIT, Medellín, Colombia This error has now been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the Article and in the accompanying Supplementary Material file. © 2019, The Author(s)

Failure Detectors Encapsulate Fairness

Failure detectors have long been viewed as abstractions for the synchronism present in distributed system models. However, investigations into the exact amount of synchronism encapsulated by a given failure detector have met with limited success. The reason for this is that traditionally, models of partial synchrony are specified with respect to real time, but failure detectors do not encapsulate real time. Instead, we argue that failure detectors encapsulate the fairness in computation and communication. Fairness is a measure of the number of steps executed by one process relative either to the number of steps taken by another process or relative to the duration for which a message is in transit. We argue that partially synchronous systems are perhaps better specified with fairness constraints (rather than real-time constraints) on computation and communication. We demonstrate the utility of this approach by specifying the weakest system models to implement failure detectors in the Chandra-Toueg hierarchy