3,459 research outputs found
Scalable Methods for Adaptively Seeding a Social Network
In recent years, social networking platforms have developed into
extraordinary channels for spreading and consuming information. Along with the
rise of such infrastructure, there is continuous progress on techniques for
spreading information effectively through influential users. In many
applications, one is restricted to select influencers from a set of users who
engaged with the topic being promoted, and due to the structure of social
networks, these users often rank low in terms of their influence potential. An
alternative approach one can consider is an adaptive method which selects users
in a manner which targets their influential neighbors. The advantage of such an
approach is that it leverages the friendship paradox in social networks: while
users are often not influential, they often know someone who is.
Despite the various complexities in such optimization problems, we show that
scalable adaptive seeding is achievable. In particular, we develop algorithms
for linear influence models with provable approximation guarantees that can be
gracefully parallelized. To show the effectiveness of our methods we collected
data from various verticals social network users follow. For each vertical, we
collected data on the users who responded to a certain post as well as their
neighbors, and applied our methods on this data. Our experiments show that
adaptive seeding is scalable, and importantly, that it obtains dramatic
improvements over standard approaches of information dissemination.Comment: Full version of the paper appearing in WWW 201
On the viability of holistic cosmic-ray source models
We consider the energy spectrum of cosmic-rays (CRs) from a purely
phenomenological point of view and investigate the possibility that they all be
produced by the same type of sources with a single power-law spectrum, in
E^{-x}, from thermal to ultra-high energies. We show that the relative fluxes
of the Galactic (GCR) and extra-galactic (EGCR) components are compatible with
such a holistic model, provided that the index of the source spectrum be x
\simeq 2.23\pm 0.07. This is compatible with the best-fit indices for both GCRs
and EGCRs, assuming that their source composition is the same, which is indeed
the case in a holistic model. It is also compatible with theoretical
expectations for particle acceleration at relativistic shocks.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, Accepted for publication in Astronomy and
Astrophysic
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