This is a talk on opinion dynamics (especially bounded-confidence models) on generalized networks.
It is part of the MIX-NEXT III (Multiscale & Integrative compleX Networks: EXperiments & Theories) satellite at NetSci 2022.
(Thursday 14 July 2022)
Centrality in Time- Dependent NetworksMason Porter
My slides for my keynote talk at the NetSci 2018 (#NetSci2018) conference in Paris, France (June 2018). This talk will take place on Thursday 13 June in the morning.
Introduction to Topological Data AnalysisMason Porter
Here are slides for my 3/14/21 talk on an introduction to topological data analysis.
This is the first talk in our Short Course on topological data analysis at the 2021 American Physical Society (APS) March Meeting: https://march.aps.org/program/dsoft/gsnp-short-course-introduction-to-topological-data-analysis/
Presented "Random Walk on Graphs" in the reading group for Knoesis. Specifically for Recommendation Context.
Referred: Purnamrita Sarkar, Random Walks on Graphs: An Overview
This is a colloquium that I presented on 4/22/21: Stockholm University, Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (NORDITA), WINQ–AlbaNova Colloquium
Here is a video of my talk: http://video.albanova.se/ALBANOVA20210422/video.mp4
Centrality in Time- Dependent NetworksMason Porter
My slides for my keynote talk at the NetSci 2018 (#NetSci2018) conference in Paris, France (June 2018). This talk will take place on Thursday 13 June in the morning.
Introduction to Topological Data AnalysisMason Porter
Here are slides for my 3/14/21 talk on an introduction to topological data analysis.
This is the first talk in our Short Course on topological data analysis at the 2021 American Physical Society (APS) March Meeting: https://march.aps.org/program/dsoft/gsnp-short-course-introduction-to-topological-data-analysis/
Presented "Random Walk on Graphs" in the reading group for Knoesis. Specifically for Recommendation Context.
Referred: Purnamrita Sarkar, Random Walks on Graphs: An Overview
This is a colloquium that I presented on 4/22/21: Stockholm University, Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (NORDITA), WINQ–AlbaNova Colloquium
Here is a video of my talk: http://video.albanova.se/ALBANOVA20210422/video.mp4
Big Bird - Transformers for Longer Sequencestaeseon ryu
안녕하세요 딥러닝 논문 읽기 모임입니다. 오늘 업로드된 논문 리뷰 영상은 NeurIPS 2020 에 발표된 'Big Bird - Transformers for Longer Sequences'라는 제목의 논문입니다.
오늘 소개해 드릴 논문은 Big Bird로, Transformer 계열 논문들의 Full Attention 구조의 한계를 리캡하고, Long Sequence의 처리를 매우 효율적으로 처리하기 위함을 목표로 나온 논문입니다. 트랜스포머의 엄청난 성능은 이미 다들 잘 알고 계시지만, 시퀀스 길이가 길어질수록 연산의 한계에 부딪히게 되는데, 이에 많은 논문이 비효율적인 연산을 줄이고자 많은 시도가 있었고, Big Bird도 그중 하나의 논문이라고 생각해 주시면 됩니다. 오늘 논문 리뷰를 위해 자연어 처리팀 백지윤 님이 자세한 리뷰 도와주셨습니다.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is often taught at the academic level from the perspective of computational linguists. However, as data scientists, we have a richer view of the world of natural language - unstructured data that by its very nature has important latent information for humans. NLP practitioners have benefitted from machine learning techniques to unlock meaning from large corpora, and in this class we’ll explore how to do that particularly with Python, the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), and to a lesser extent, the Gensim Library.
NLTK is an excellent library for machine learning-based NLP, written in Python by experts from both academia and industry. Python allows you to create rich data applications rapidly, iterating on hypotheses. Gensim provides vector-based topic modeling, which is currently absent in both NLTK and Scikit-Learn. The combination of Python + NLTK means that you can easily add language-aware data products to your larger analytical workflows and applications.
This Edureka Python tutorial will help you in learning various sequences in Python - Lists, Tuples, Strings, Sets, Dictionaries. It will also explain various operations possible on them. Below are the topics covered in this tutorial:
1. Python Sequences
2. Python Lists
3. Python Tuples
4. Python Sets
5. Python Dictionaries
6. Python Strings
Continuous representations of words and documents, which is recently referred to as Word Embeddings, have recently demonstrated large advancements in many of the Natural language processing tasks.
In this presentation we will provide an introduction to the most common methods of learning these representations. As well as previous methods in building these representations before the recent advances in deep learning, such as dimensionality reduction on the word co-occurrence matrix.
Moreover, we will present the continuous bag of word model (CBOW), one of the most successful models for word embeddings and one of the core models in word2vec, and in brief a glance of many other models of building representations for other tasks such as knowledge base embeddings.
Finally, we will motivate the potential of using such embeddings for many tasks that could be of importance for the group, such as semantic similarity, document clustering and retrieval.
PR-284: End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers(DETR)Jinwon Lee
TensorFlow Korea 논문읽기모임 PR12 284번째 논문 review입니다.
이번 논문은 Facebook에서 나온 DETR(DEtection with TRansformer) 입니다.
arxiv-sanity에 top recent/last year에서 가장 상위에 자리하고 있는 논문이기도 합니다(http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/top?timefilter=year&vfilter=all)
최근에 ICLR 2021에 submit된 ViT로 인해서 이제 Transformer가 CNN을 대체하는 것 아닌가 하는 얘기들이 많이 나오고 있는데요, 올 해 ECCV에 발표된 논문이고 feature extraction 부분은 CNN을 사용하긴 했지만 transformer를 활용하여 효과적으로 Object Detection을 수행하는 방법을 제안한 중요한 논문이라고 생각합니다. 이 논문에서는 detection 문제에서 anchor box나 NMS(Non Maximum Supression)와 같은 heuristic 하고 미분 불가능한 방법들이 많이 사용되고, 이로 인해서 유독 object detection 문제는 딥러닝의 철학인 end-to-end 방식으로 해결되지 못하고 있음을 지적하고 있습니다. 그 해결책으로 bounding box를 예측하는 문제를 set prediction problem(중복을 허용하지 않고, 순서에 무관함)으로 보고 transformer를 활용한 end-to-end 방식의 알고리즘을 제안하였습니다. anchor box도 필요없고 NMS도 필요없는 DETR 알고리즘의 자세한 내용이 알고싶으시면 영상을 참고해주세요!
영상링크: https://youtu.be/lXpBcW_I54U
논문링크: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.12872
This is a presentation I gave in a workshop on "Language, concepts, history" organized by historian Joanna Innes. It took place on Friday 4/22/16 in Somerville College, Oxford.
I was one of the only people present who was not from the humanities, so it was a rather different-than-usual audience and set of participants for me.
I drew some of these slides from other presentations to rather different audiences. I emphasized rather different parts of some of those slides, so I am not sure if the slides on their own give an accurate reflection of the difference between this presentation and some of my other ones.
I thought the presentation went rather well.
Big Bird - Transformers for Longer Sequencestaeseon ryu
안녕하세요 딥러닝 논문 읽기 모임입니다. 오늘 업로드된 논문 리뷰 영상은 NeurIPS 2020 에 발표된 'Big Bird - Transformers for Longer Sequences'라는 제목의 논문입니다.
오늘 소개해 드릴 논문은 Big Bird로, Transformer 계열 논문들의 Full Attention 구조의 한계를 리캡하고, Long Sequence의 처리를 매우 효율적으로 처리하기 위함을 목표로 나온 논문입니다. 트랜스포머의 엄청난 성능은 이미 다들 잘 알고 계시지만, 시퀀스 길이가 길어질수록 연산의 한계에 부딪히게 되는데, 이에 많은 논문이 비효율적인 연산을 줄이고자 많은 시도가 있었고, Big Bird도 그중 하나의 논문이라고 생각해 주시면 됩니다. 오늘 논문 리뷰를 위해 자연어 처리팀 백지윤 님이 자세한 리뷰 도와주셨습니다.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is often taught at the academic level from the perspective of computational linguists. However, as data scientists, we have a richer view of the world of natural language - unstructured data that by its very nature has important latent information for humans. NLP practitioners have benefitted from machine learning techniques to unlock meaning from large corpora, and in this class we’ll explore how to do that particularly with Python, the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), and to a lesser extent, the Gensim Library.
NLTK is an excellent library for machine learning-based NLP, written in Python by experts from both academia and industry. Python allows you to create rich data applications rapidly, iterating on hypotheses. Gensim provides vector-based topic modeling, which is currently absent in both NLTK and Scikit-Learn. The combination of Python + NLTK means that you can easily add language-aware data products to your larger analytical workflows and applications.
This Edureka Python tutorial will help you in learning various sequences in Python - Lists, Tuples, Strings, Sets, Dictionaries. It will also explain various operations possible on them. Below are the topics covered in this tutorial:
1. Python Sequences
2. Python Lists
3. Python Tuples
4. Python Sets
5. Python Dictionaries
6. Python Strings
Continuous representations of words and documents, which is recently referred to as Word Embeddings, have recently demonstrated large advancements in many of the Natural language processing tasks.
In this presentation we will provide an introduction to the most common methods of learning these representations. As well as previous methods in building these representations before the recent advances in deep learning, such as dimensionality reduction on the word co-occurrence matrix.
Moreover, we will present the continuous bag of word model (CBOW), one of the most successful models for word embeddings and one of the core models in word2vec, and in brief a glance of many other models of building representations for other tasks such as knowledge base embeddings.
Finally, we will motivate the potential of using such embeddings for many tasks that could be of importance for the group, such as semantic similarity, document clustering and retrieval.
PR-284: End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers(DETR)Jinwon Lee
TensorFlow Korea 논문읽기모임 PR12 284번째 논문 review입니다.
이번 논문은 Facebook에서 나온 DETR(DEtection with TRansformer) 입니다.
arxiv-sanity에 top recent/last year에서 가장 상위에 자리하고 있는 논문이기도 합니다(http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/top?timefilter=year&vfilter=all)
최근에 ICLR 2021에 submit된 ViT로 인해서 이제 Transformer가 CNN을 대체하는 것 아닌가 하는 얘기들이 많이 나오고 있는데요, 올 해 ECCV에 발표된 논문이고 feature extraction 부분은 CNN을 사용하긴 했지만 transformer를 활용하여 효과적으로 Object Detection을 수행하는 방법을 제안한 중요한 논문이라고 생각합니다. 이 논문에서는 detection 문제에서 anchor box나 NMS(Non Maximum Supression)와 같은 heuristic 하고 미분 불가능한 방법들이 많이 사용되고, 이로 인해서 유독 object detection 문제는 딥러닝의 철학인 end-to-end 방식으로 해결되지 못하고 있음을 지적하고 있습니다. 그 해결책으로 bounding box를 예측하는 문제를 set prediction problem(중복을 허용하지 않고, 순서에 무관함)으로 보고 transformer를 활용한 end-to-end 방식의 알고리즘을 제안하였습니다. anchor box도 필요없고 NMS도 필요없는 DETR 알고리즘의 자세한 내용이 알고싶으시면 영상을 참고해주세요!
영상링크: https://youtu.be/lXpBcW_I54U
논문링크: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.12872
This is a presentation I gave in a workshop on "Language, concepts, history" organized by historian Joanna Innes. It took place on Friday 4/22/16 in Somerville College, Oxford.
I was one of the only people present who was not from the humanities, so it was a rather different-than-usual audience and set of participants for me.
I drew some of these slides from other presentations to rather different audiences. I emphasized rather different parts of some of those slides, so I am not sure if the slides on their own give an accurate reflection of the difference between this presentation and some of my other ones.
I thought the presentation went rather well.
Mathematical Models of the Spread of Diseases, Opinions, Information, and Mis...Mason Porter
This is my general-audience talk at DiscCon III (2021 WorldCon).
My talk overlapped with the Hugo Award ceremony, but the video will be posted later on the DisCon website for attendees who want to see it.
The International Journal of Engineering and Science (IJES)theijes
The International Journal of Engineering & Science is aimed at providing a platform for researchers, engineers, scientists, or educators to publish their original research results, to exchange new ideas, to disseminate information in innovative designs, engineering experiences and technological skills. It is also the Journal's objective to promote engineering and technology education. All papers submitted to the Journal will be blind peer-reviewed. Only original articles will be published.
Analyses of the structure of social-personality psychology as manifest in bibliometric couplings within the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology for selected years between 1981 and 2014
In this talk we shall introduce the main ideas of TruSIS (Trust in Social Internetworking System), a Marie Curie Fellowhsip financed by European Union and hosted at VU University, Department of Computer Science, Business and Web group. The goal of TruSIS is to study the baheviour of users who affiliate to multiple social networking sites and
are active in them (e.g., users may publish personal profiles on sites like MySpace and post videos on sites like YouTube). We briefly called this scenario as SIS (Social Internetworking system).
As a first research contribution, we implemented a crawler to gather data about users and link their profiles on multiple social networking websites. To this purpose we used Google Social Graph API, a powerful API released by Google in 2008. We obtained a sample of about 1.3 millions of user accounts and 36 millions of connections between them.
Parameters from social network theory (like average clustering coefficient, network modularity and so on) were used to study the structural properties of the gathered sample and how these properties depend on user behavious.
A second contribution is about the computation of distance between two users in a SIS on the basis of their social ties. We used a popular parameter from Social Network Theory known as Katz coeffcient and
provide a computationally afficient approach to computing Katz coefficient which relies on the usage of a popular tool from linear algebra known as Sherman- Morrison formula.
Finally, we shall describe our work on extending the notion of trust from single social networks to a SIS. We describe the main research challenges tied to the definition of trust and how they relate to Semantic Web technologies.
Topological Data Analysis of Complex Spatial SystemsMason Porter
These are slides from a seminar I gave in "Cardiff" (for the mathematics department at University of Cardiff) on 4/15/20.
You can also find a recording of a similar talk that I gave in March 2020 for MBI (Mathematical Biosciences Institute): https://mbi.osu.edu/events/online-colloquium-mason-porter-spatial-systems-and-topological-data-analysis
Here are my slides (though the animated gifs on a couple of them are stills in this version) of my talk on an introduction to the science of "chaos" at WorldCon 77 in Dublin, Ireland.
This is my attempt to give a gentle introduction to the notion of chaos to a science-fiction audience.
Paper Writing in Applied Mathematics (slightly updated slides)Mason Porter
Here are my slides (which I have updated very slightly) in writing papers in applied mathematics.
There will be an accompanying oral presentation and discussion on Friday 20 April. I am recording the video for that and plan to post it along with these (or a further updated version of these) slides.
Tutorial on Paper-Writing in Applied Mathematics (Preliminary Draft of Slides)Mason Porter
These are preliminary slides for a tutorial and discussion on "Writing Papers in Applied Mathematics" that I'll be giving at UCLA, first for a few of my own PhD students on 4/6 and later (on 4/20 ?) in a recorded session to a larger UCLA group.
Several people have expressed interest, so I will post the recorded session online and circulate it.
These slides are for my talk for the Somerville College Mathematics Reunion ("Somerville Maths Reunion", 6/24/17): http://www.some.ox.ac.uk/event/somerville-maths-reunion/
My talk at the 2017 SIAM "Snowbird" conference on applications of dynamical systems (#SIAMDS17).
I spoke in a session on topological data analysis (TDA). My talk concerned persistent homology and its application to Brexit data (including voting data) and "functional networks" from coupled time series from both experiments and output of dynamical systems.
Eventually, a version of these slides that is synchronized with the audio of my talk is supposed to be posted online.
This is my attempt at an introduction to data ethics for mathematicians. Mathematicians increasingly need to deal with these kinds of issues, but we don't have the tradition of ethics training from other disciplines.
I welcome comments on how to improve these slides. Did I miss any salient points? Do you want to offer a different perspective on any of these? Do you want to offer any counterpoints? (Please e-mail me directly with comments and suggestions.)
Eventually, I hope to develop these slides further into an article for a venue aimed at mathematical scientists, and of course I would love to have knowledgeable coauthors who can offer a different perspective from mine.
My slides from my 3-hour tutorial on mesoscale structures in networks from the 2016 Lake Como School on Complex Networks (http://ntmb.lakecomoschool.org/).
After my talk, Tiago Peixoto gave a talk on statistical inference of large-scale mesoscale structures in networks. His presentation, which takes a complementary perspective from mine, is available at the following website: https://speakerdeck.com/count0/statisical-inference-of-generative-network-models
Networks in Space: Granular Force Networks and BeyondMason Porter
This is my talk for the Network Geometry Workshop (http://ginestra-bianconi-6flt.squarespace.com) at QMUL on 16 July 2015.
(A few of the slides are adapted from slides by my coauthors Dani Bassett and Karen Daniels.)
These are slides for my tutorial talk on network dynamics. (The colors are fine in the downloaded version, though there seem to be color issues if you view the slides directly in slideshare.)
Slides from my talk on a systems-level investigation of long-term human migration in Korea. Our paper is available at the following page: http://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.4.041009
I adapted these slides from the ones created by my coauthor Sang Hoon Lee.
These are the slides for a tutorial talk about "multilayer networks" that I gave at NetSci 2014.
I walk people through a review article that I wrote with my PLEXMATH collaborators: http://comnet.oxfordjournals.org/content/2/3/203
Multi-source connectivity as the driver of solar wind variability in the heli...Sérgio Sacani
The ambient solar wind that flls the heliosphere originates from multiple
sources in the solar corona and is highly structured. It is often described
as high-speed, relatively homogeneous, plasma streams from coronal
holes and slow-speed, highly variable, streams whose source regions are
under debate. A key goal of ESA/NASA’s Solar Orbiter mission is to identify
solar wind sources and understand what drives the complexity seen in the
heliosphere. By combining magnetic feld modelling and spectroscopic
techniques with high-resolution observations and measurements, we show
that the solar wind variability detected in situ by Solar Orbiter in March
2022 is driven by spatio-temporal changes in the magnetic connectivity to
multiple sources in the solar atmosphere. The magnetic feld footpoints
connected to the spacecraft moved from the boundaries of a coronal hole
to one active region (12961) and then across to another region (12957). This
is refected in the in situ measurements, which show the transition from fast
to highly Alfvénic then to slow solar wind that is disrupted by the arrival of
a coronal mass ejection. Our results describe solar wind variability at 0.5 au
but are applicable to near-Earth observatories.
Observation of Io’s Resurfacing via Plume Deposition Using Ground-based Adapt...Sérgio Sacani
Since volcanic activity was first discovered on Io from Voyager images in 1979, changes
on Io’s surface have been monitored from both spacecraft and ground-based telescopes.
Here, we present the highest spatial resolution images of Io ever obtained from a groundbased telescope. These images, acquired by the SHARK-VIS instrument on the Large
Binocular Telescope, show evidence of a major resurfacing event on Io’s trailing hemisphere. When compared to the most recent spacecraft images, the SHARK-VIS images
show that a plume deposit from a powerful eruption at Pillan Patera has covered part
of the long-lived Pele plume deposit. Although this type of resurfacing event may be common on Io, few have been detected due to the rarity of spacecraft visits and the previously low spatial resolution available from Earth-based telescopes. The SHARK-VIS instrument ushers in a new era of high resolution imaging of Io’s surface using adaptive
optics at visible wavelengths.
A brief information about the SCOP protein database used in bioinformatics.
The Structural Classification of Proteins (SCOP) database is a comprehensive and authoritative resource for the structural and evolutionary relationships of proteins. It provides a detailed and curated classification of protein structures, grouping them into families, superfamilies, and folds based on their structural and sequence similarities.
Richard's aventures in two entangled wonderlandsRichard Gill
Since the loophole-free Bell experiments of 2020 and the Nobel prizes in physics of 2022, critics of Bell's work have retreated to the fortress of super-determinism. Now, super-determinism is a derogatory word - it just means "determinism". Palmer, Hance and Hossenfelder argue that quantum mechanics and determinism are not incompatible, using a sophisticated mathematical construction based on a subtle thinning of allowed states and measurements in quantum mechanics, such that what is left appears to make Bell's argument fail, without altering the empirical predictions of quantum mechanics. I think however that it is a smoke screen, and the slogan "lost in math" comes to my mind. I will discuss some other recent disproofs of Bell's theorem using the language of causality based on causal graphs. Causal thinking is also central to law and justice. I will mention surprising connections to my work on serial killer nurse cases, in particular the Dutch case of Lucia de Berk and the current UK case of Lucy Letby.
Introduction:
RNA interference (RNAi) or Post-Transcriptional Gene Silencing (PTGS) is an important biological process for modulating eukaryotic gene expression.
It is highly conserved process of posttranscriptional gene silencing by which double stranded RNA (dsRNA) causes sequence-specific degradation of mRNA sequences.
dsRNA-induced gene silencing (RNAi) is reported in a wide range of eukaryotes ranging from worms, insects, mammals and plants.
This process mediates resistance to both endogenous parasitic and exogenous pathogenic nucleic acids, and regulates the expression of protein-coding genes.
What are small ncRNAs?
micro RNA (miRNA)
short interfering RNA (siRNA)
Properties of small non-coding RNA:
Involved in silencing mRNA transcripts.
Called “small” because they are usually only about 21-24 nucleotides long.
Synthesized by first cutting up longer precursor sequences (like the 61nt one that Lee discovered).
Silence an mRNA by base pairing with some sequence on the mRNA.
Discovery of siRNA?
The first small RNA:
In 1993 Rosalind Lee (Victor Ambros lab) was studying a non- coding gene in C. elegans, lin-4, that was involved in silencing of another gene, lin-14, at the appropriate time in the
development of the worm C. elegans.
Two small transcripts of lin-4 (22nt and 61nt) were found to be complementary to a sequence in the 3' UTR of lin-14.
Because lin-4 encoded no protein, she deduced that it must be these transcripts that are causing the silencing by RNA-RNA interactions.
Types of RNAi ( non coding RNA)
MiRNA
Length (23-25 nt)
Trans acting
Binds with target MRNA in mismatch
Translation inhibition
Si RNA
Length 21 nt.
Cis acting
Bind with target Mrna in perfect complementary sequence
Piwi-RNA
Length ; 25 to 36 nt.
Expressed in Germ Cells
Regulates trnasposomes activity
MECHANISM OF RNAI:
First the double-stranded RNA teams up with a protein complex named Dicer, which cuts the long RNA into short pieces.
Then another protein complex called RISC (RNA-induced silencing complex) discards one of the two RNA strands.
The RISC-docked, single-stranded RNA then pairs with the homologous mRNA and destroys it.
THE RISC COMPLEX:
RISC is large(>500kD) RNA multi- protein Binding complex which triggers MRNA degradation in response to MRNA
Unwinding of double stranded Si RNA by ATP independent Helicase
Active component of RISC is Ago proteins( ENDONUCLEASE) which cleave target MRNA.
DICER: endonuclease (RNase Family III)
Argonaute: Central Component of the RNA-Induced Silencing Complex (RISC)
One strand of the dsRNA produced by Dicer is retained in the RISC complex in association with Argonaute
ARGONAUTE PROTEIN :
1.PAZ(PIWI/Argonaute/ Zwille)- Recognition of target MRNA
2.PIWI (p-element induced wimpy Testis)- breaks Phosphodiester bond of mRNA.)RNAse H activity.
MiRNA:
The Double-stranded RNAs are naturally produced in eukaryotic cells during development, and they have a key role in regulating gene expression .
2. Outline
•Introduction: Modeling of social dynamics and opinions on networks
•Bounded-confidence models (BCMs) of opinion dynamics
•A BCM on hypergraphs
•An adaptive BCM
•A BCM with node weights
•Opinion dynamics coupled to disease dynamics
•Conclusions
3. Some Review Articles
•Hossein Noorazar, Kevin R. Vixie, Arghavan Talebanpour, & Yunfeng Hu
[2020], “From classical to modern opinion dynamics”, International
Journal of Modern Physics C, Vol. 31, No. 07: 2050101
•Claudio Castellano, Santo Fortunato, & Vittorio Loreto [2009], “Statistical
physics of social dynamics”, Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 81, No. 2:
pp. 591–646
•Sune Lehmann & Yong-Yeol Ahn [2018], Complex Spreading Phenomena
in Social Systems: Influence and Contagion on Real-World Social
Networks, Springer International Publishing
4. What People Study in Models of Social Dynamics
• Note: Researchers focus on different things in different types of models
• Consensus vs Polarization vs Fragmentation
• How do you measure polarization and fragmentation?
• What is the convergence time to a steady state (if one reaches one)?
• Cascades and virality
• How far and how fast do things (e.g., a meme) spread? When do things go viral, and when do they not?
• Measuring virality in theory (e.g., percolation and giant components) versus in practice
• Incorporating behavior into models of the spread of diseases
• Just concluding that model social dynamics is impossible to do well and giving up on it isn’t an option
for studying certain problems
• More general: Investigate effects of network structure on dynamical processes (and vice versa)
• Making good choices of synthetic networks to consider is often helpful for obtaining insights
5. Dynamical Processes on Networks
•Incorporate which individuals (nodes) interact with which other
individuals via their ties (edges).
•This yields a dynamical system on a network.
•Basic question: How does network structure affect dynamics (and
vice versa)?
•MAP & J. P Gleeson [2016], “Dynamical Systems on Networks: A
Tutorial”, Frontiers in Applied Dynamical Systems: Reviews and
Tutorials, Vol. 4
6. Some Challenges in Modeling Social Dynamics
• How “correct” can these models ever be?
• But maybe they can be insightful or helpful?
• How does one connect the models and the behavior of those models with real life and real
data?
• Example: Can one measure somebody’s opinion as some scalar in the interval [–1,1] based
on their online “fingerprints” or survey answers?
• Comparing outputs like spreading trees of tweets from a model and reality, rather than
comparing node states themselves?
• Ethical considerations in measurements in attempts to evaluate models of social dynamics
with real data
• More general: complexity of models versus mathematical analysis of them?
7. Types of Social-Dynamics Models
• Compartmental models (hijacked from disease dynamics), threshold models
(percolation-like), voter models, majority-vote models, DeGroot models, bounded-
confidence models, games on networks, …
• Discrete states versus continuous-valued states
• Deterministic update rules versus stochastic update rules
• Dynamical systems versus stochastic processes
• Synchronous updating of node states versus asynchronous updating
• Note: Some of the different types of models can be related to each other
• Example: Certain threshold models have been written in game-theoretic terms
8. Generalizing Network Structures
• Weighted networks, multilayer networks, temporal networks, adaptive networks, hypergraphs (and,
more generally, polyadic interactions), etc.
• How do such more general structures affect dynamics?
• What new phenomena occur that cannot arise in simpler situations?
• There are multiple choices for how to do the generalizations, and they matter significantly
• When is consensus more likely, and when is it less likely?
• When is convergence to a steady state accelerated and when is it slowed down?
• When is virality more likely, and when is it less likely?
• If you do the “same type of generalization” on different types of models (e.g., a voter model vs a
bounded-confidence model), when does it have a similar/different effect on the qualitative dynamics?
• Example: Under what conditions do polyadic interactions promote consensus and when do they make it harder?
How does this answer differ — does it? — in different types of social-dynamics models?
9. Some Application-Related Questions
• Spread and mitigation of misinformation, disinformation, and “fake news”
• Formation of echo chambers
• Spread of extremist opinions
• Measuring and forecasting viral posts?
• Distinguishing internal effects from external ones (e.g., something gets popular
enough from retweets that it then shows up on mainstream media sources)
• Inverse problems
• Example: determining “patient 0” in the spread of content
• “Majority illusion” and “minority illusion”
11. Bounded-Confidence Models
• Continuous-valued opinions on some space, such as [–1,1]
• When two agents interact:
• If their opinions are sufficiently close, they compromise by some amount
• Otherwise, their opinions don’t change
• Two best-known variants
• Deffuant–Weisbuch (DW) model: asynchronous updating of node states
• Hegselmann–Krause (HK) model: synchronous updating of node states
• Most traditionally studied without network structure (i.e., all-to-all coupling of agents) and with a
view towards studying consensus
• By contrast, early motivation — but has not been explored much in practice — of bounded-confidence
models was to examine how extremist ideas, even when seeded in a small proportion of a population,
can take root in a population
12. BCMs on Networks
• X. Flora Meng, Robert A. Van Gorder, & MAP [2018], “Opinion Formation and Distribution in a Bounded-
Confidence Model on Various Networks”, Physical Review E, Vol. 97, No. 2: 022312
• Network structure has a major effect on the dynamics, including how many opinion groups form and how long they take to form
• At each discrete time, randomly select a pair of agents who are adjacent in a network
• If their opinions are close enough, they compromise their opinion by an amount proportional to the difference
• If their opinions are too far apart, they don’t change
• Complicated dynamics
• Does consensus occur? How many opinion groups are there at steady state? How long does it take to converge to steady state?
How does this depend on parameters and network structure?
• Example: Convergence time seems to undergo a critical transition with respect to opinion confidence bound (indicating
compromise range) on some types of networks
15. A BCM on Hypergraphs
•A. Hickok, Y. Kureh, H. Z. Brooks, M. Feng, & MAP [2022], “A
Bounded-Confidence Model of Opinion Dynamics on Hypergraphs”, SIAM
Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems, Vol. 21, No. 1: 1–32.
•In addition to dyadic (i.e., pairwise) interactions between nodes, also
consider polyadic interactions
•Asynchronous updates (generalizes DW model)
•Quantify the disagreement among the nodes in a hyperedge with a
discordance function:
16. A BCM on Hypergraphs
•Select one hyperedge at each time and update node opinions to the mean
opinion of the hyperedge if the discordance function is less than a
confidence bound:
18. Two General Questions for
Networks with Polyadic Interactions
•1. When generalizing opinion dynamics to incorporate polyadic
interactions, which generalizations make consensus more likely and why
generalizations make consensus less likely?
•2. When generalizing opinion dynamics to incorporate polyadic
interactions, which generalizations speed up convergence to a steady state
and which generalizations slow it down?
19. An Adaptive BCM
• U. Kan, M. Feng, & MAP [2021], “An Adaptive Bounded-Confidence Model of
Opinion Dynamics on Networks”, arXiv:2112.05856
• Adaptive model: the opinions of the nodes are coupled to changes in the network
structure
• Generalize DW model with 1D opinions (on a finite interval)
• Both a confidence bound C and a second bound ! ≥ C that determines an opinion-
tolerance threshold for when we consider an edge to be “discordant”
• Discordant edges may rewire so that nodes connect to nodes with more similar
opinions (“homophilic rewiring”)
20. An Adaptive BCM
•Our adaptive BCM requires a larger confidence bound than the standard
DW model to achieve consensus.
•Our BCM includes ‘pseudo-consensus’ steady states, in which there exist
two subclusters within an opinion-consensus group that differ from each
other by a small amount.
23. A BCM with Node Weights
•Grace J. Li & MAP [2022], “A Bounded-Confidence Model of Opinion
Dynamics with Heterogeneous Node-Activity Levels”, arXiv:2206.09490
•Some individuals share their opinions more frequently than others
• Heterogeneous sociabilities, activity levels, prevalences to share opinions, etc.
•How do heterogeneous node-activity levels affect BCM dynamics?
• In our model, it results in (1) slower convergence to steady states and (2) more
opinion fragmentation than in a baseline DW model.
• More general question: How do node weights affect dynamical processes?
24. “Weighted networks”
should not automatically
refer to edge weights!
Public Service Announcement:The network-science community
should spend much more time on studying node weights and their
influence on dynamical processes on networks.
28. Coupling the Spread of Opinions/Behavior
with the Spread of a Disease
• Jamie Bedson et al. [2021], “A review and agenda for integrated disease models
including social and behavioural factors”, Nature Human Behaviour, Vol. 5, No. 7:
834–846
• In a compartmental model, nodes have different states (i.e., “compartments”) and there
are rules for how to transition between states
• For example, in a stochastic SIR (susceptible–infected–recovered) model, nodes in S change to I
with some probability if they have a contact with a node in I. Nodes in I recover and change to
R with some probability.
• A rich history of work on mean-field theories (both homogeneous and heterogeneous
ones), pair approximations, and other approximations.
• István Z. Kiss, Joel C. Miller, & Péter L. Simon [2017], Mathematics of Epidemics on
Networks: From Exact to Approximate Models, Springer International Publishing
29. Coupling the Spread of Opinions/Behavior
with the Spread of a Disease
• Kaiyan Peng, Zheng Lu, Vanessa Lin, Michael R. Lindstrom, Christian Parkinson, Chuntian
Wang, Andrea L. Bertozzi, & Mason A. Porter [2021], “A Multilayer Network Model of the
Coevolution of the Spread of a Disease and Competing Opinions”, Mathematical Models and
Methods in Applied Sciences, Vol. 31, No. 12: 2455–2494
• Opinions (no opinion, pro-physical-distancing, and anti-physical-distancing) spread on one layer
of a multilayer network.
• An infectious disease spreads on the other layer. People who are anti-physical-distancing are
more likely to become infected.
• It is crucial to develop models in which human behavior is coupled to disease spread. Models of
disease spread need to incorporate behavior.
• For simplicity (e.g., the same type of mathematical form in the right-hand sides for both layers), we
used compartmental models for each layer (SIR/SIR and SIR/SIRS). It is important to develop more
realistic models.
32. Conclusions
• Lots of cool stuff to study in models of social dynamics and opinions on networks
• How do generalized network structures affect opinion dynamics on networks?
• Consensus versus polarization versus fragmentation?
• Convergence times to steady states?
• When do generalizations affect things in one qualitative way (e.g., more consensus), and when do they affect things
in another way (e.g., less consensus)?
• Some other work and works in progress
• W. Chu & MAP [2022], “A Density Description of a Bounded-Confidence Model of Opinion Dynamics on Hypergraphs”,
arXiv:2203.12189
• W. Chu & MAP, “Non-Markovian Models of Opinion Dynamics with Random Jumps on Networks”, in preparation
• H. Z. Brooks & MAP, “Spreading Cascades in Bounded-Confidence Dynamics on Networks”, in preparation
• P. Chodrow, H. Z. Brooks, & MAP, “Bifurcations in Bounded-Confidence Models with Smooth Transition Functions”, in
preparation