Events Calendar

AI SEMINAR

Speaker: James Gleeson, Professor, University of Limerick

Talk Title: Competition and avalanches in social spreading phenomena

Series: AI Seminar

Abstract: We consider the spreading of memes (distinct pieces of information like ideas, hashtags, URLs, etc.) on a large directed social network, like Twitter. We use a branching-process model to describe how users choose among multiple sources of incoming information, similar to models used in other studies, which rely on intensive computational simulations to fit to data. In contrast, we here develop analytical insights into the respective roles of the network degree distribution, the memory-time distribution of users, and the competition between memes for the limited resource of user attention. The result is a form of self-organised criticality, which we dub competition-induced criticality. Using this analysis, we fit the model to data on Twitter hashtags, and predict features of the time-dependent data. This work is in collaboration with Yamir Moreno, Raquel A. Baños (both Universidad de Zaragoza), and Kevin O Sullivan (University of Limerick)

Biography: Professor James Gleeson holds the Chair in Industrial and Applied Mathematics at the University of Limerick. He is a graduate of University College Dublin in Mathematical Sciences and Mathematical Physics and received his PhD in Applied Mathematics from Caltech in 1999. Following his graduation from Caltech, he was a visiting assistant professor in Arizona State University, and then moved to University College Cork for 7 years, before taking up his current position at the University of Limerick. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Complex Networks; is a council member of the European Consortium for Mathematics for Industry, and was appointed to the Irish Research Council by Minister Sean Sherlock in 2013. As co-director of MACSI, the Mathematics Applications Consortium for Science and Industry, he leads research into applications of mathematics to real-world problems with significant economic and social impact. His research interests include stochastic dynamics and contagion on complex networks

Host: Kristina Lerman

Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=fff38167d27a42cc9a0ad981a082d7c71d

Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 1135 - 11th fl Large CR

WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=fff38167d27a42cc9a0ad981a082d7c71d

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute