Articles

The ripple of fear, sympathy and solidarity during the Boston bombings

The Boston Marathon bombing presents a rare opportunity to study how a disruptive event can trigger inter-communal emotions and expressions - where members of one community express feelings about and support f...

Authors: Yu-Ru Lin and Drew Margolin

Information dynamic spectrum characterizes system instability toward critical transitions

This paper addresses the need of characterizing system instability toward critical transitions in complex systems. We propose a novel information dynamic spectrum framework and a probabilistic light cone metho...

Authors: Kang-Yu Ni and Tsai-Ching Lu

Fast filtering and animation of large dynamic networks

Detecting and visualizing what are the most relevant changes in an evolving network is an open challenge in several domains. We present a fast algorithm that filters subsets of the strongest nodes and edges re...

Authors: Przemyslaw A Grabowicz, Luca Maria Aiello and Filippo Menczer

Views to a war: systematic differences in media and military reporting of the war in Iraq

The quantitative study of violent conflict and its mechanisms has in recent years greatly benefited from the availability of detailed event data. With a number of highly visible studies both in the natural sci...

Authors: Karsten Donnay and Vladimir Filimonov

Stock fluctuations are correlated and amplified across networks of interlocking directorates

Traded corporations are required by law to have a majority of outside directors on their board. This requirement allows the existence of directors who sit on the board of two or more corporations at the same t...

Authors: Serguei Saavedra, Luis J Gilarranz, Rudolf P Rohr, Michael Schnabel, Brian Uzzi and Jordi Bascompte

The network positions of methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus affected units in a regional healthcare system

We studied a dataset of care episodes in a regional Swedish hospital system. We followed how 2,314,477 patients moved between 8,507 units (hospital wards and outpatient clinics) over seven years. The data also...

Authors: Jan Ohst, Fredrik Liljeros, Mikael Stenhem and Petter Holme

Uncovering nodes that spread information between communities in social networks

From many datasets gathered in online social networks, well defined community structures have been observed. A large number of users participate in these networks and the size of the resulting graphs poses com...

Authors: Alexander V Mantzaris

Inequality and cumulative advantage in science careers: a case study of high-impact journals

Analyzing a large data set of publications drawn from the most competitive journals in the natural and social sciences we show that research careers exhibit the broad distributions of individual achievement ch...

Authors: Alexander M Petersen and Orion Penner

Error and attack tolerance of collective problem solving: The DARPA Shredder Challenge

The Internet has unleashed the capacity for planetary-scale collective problem solving (also known as crowdsourcing), with ever increasing successful examples. A key hypothesis behind crowdsourcing is that, at...

Authors: Nicolas Stefanovitch, Aamena Alshamsi, Manuel Cebrian and Iyad Rahwan

Sharing political news: the balancing act of intimacy and socialization in selective exposure

One might think that, compared to traditional media, social media sites allow people to choose more freely what to read and what to share, especially for politically oriented news. However, reading and sharing...

Authors: Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, Meeyoung Cha, Krishna Gummadi and Jon Crowcroft

Exploiting citation networks for large-scale author name disambiguation

We present a novel algorithm and validation method for disambiguating author names in very large bibliographic data sets and apply it to the full Web of Science (WoS) citation index. Our algorithm relies only ...

Authors: Christian Schulz, Amin Mazloumian, Alexander M Petersen, Orion Penner and Dirk Helbing

Predicting scientific success based on coauthorship networks

We address the question to what extent the success of scientific articles is due to social influence. Analyzing a data set of over 100,000 publications from the field of Computer Science, we study how centrali...

Authors: Emre Sarigöl, René Pfitzner, Ingo Scholtes, Antonios Garas and Frank Schweitzer

Privacy-by-design in big data analytics and social mining

Privacy is ever-growing concern in our society and is becoming a fundamental aspect to take into account when one wants to use, publish and analyze data involving human personal sensitive information. Unfortun...

Authors: Anna Monreale, Salvatore Rinzivillo, Francesca Pratesi, Fosca Giannotti and Dino Pedreschi

Characterization of online groups along space, time, and social dimensions

Social groups play a crucial role in online social media because they form the basis for user participation and engagement. Although widely studied in their static and evolutionary aspects, no much attention h...

Authors: David Martin-Borregon, Luca Maria Aiello, Przemyslaw Grabowicz, Alejandro Jaimes and Ricardo Baeza-Yates

Modeling social dynamics in a collaborative environment

Wikipedia is a prime example of today’s value production in a collaborative environment. Using this example, we model the emergence, persistence and resolution of severe conflicts during collaboration by coupl...

Authors: Gerardo Iñiguez, János Török, Taha Yasseri, Kimmo Kaski and János Kertész

The impact of social segregation on human mobility in developing and industrialized regions

This study leverages mobile phone data to analyze human mobility patterns in a developing nation, especially in comparison to those of a more industrialized nation. Developing regions, such as the Ivory Coast,...

Authors: Alexander Amini, Kevin Kung, Chaogui Kang, Stanislav Sobolevsky and Carlo Ratti

Modeling dynamics of attention in social media with user efficiency

Evolution of online social networks is driven by the need of their members to shareand consume content, resulting in a complex interplay between individual activity andattention received from others. In a cont...

Authors: Carmen Vaca Ruiz, Luca Maria Aiello and Alejandro Jaimes

Scoring dynamics across professional team sports: tempo, balance and predictability

Despite growing interest in quantifying and modeling the scoring dynamics within professional sports games, relative little is known about what patterns or principles, if any, cut across different sports. Usin...

Authors: Sears Merritt and Aaron Clauset

The geography and carbon footprint of mobile phone use in Cote d’Ivoire

The newly released Orange D4D mobile phone data base provides new insights into the use of mobile technology in a developing country. Here we perform a series of spatial data analyses that reveal important geo...

Authors: Vsevolod Salnikov, Daniel Schien, Hyejin Youn, Renaud Lambiotte and Michael T Gastner

The distorted mirror of Wikipedia: a quantitative analysis of Wikipedia coverage of academics

Activity of modern scholarship creates online footprints galore. Along with traditional metrics of research quality, such as citation counts, online images of researchers and institutions increasingly matter i...

Authors: Anna Samoilenko and Taha Yasseri

Dynamics and spatial distribution of global nighttime lights

Using open source data, we observe the fascinating dynamics of nighttime light. Following a global economic regime shift, the planetary center of light can be seen moving eastwards at a pace of about 60 km per...

Authors: Peter Cauwels, Nicola Pestalozzi and Didier Sornette

The role of hidden influentials in the diffusion of online information cascades

In a diversified context with multiple social networking sites, heterogeneous activity patterns and different user-user relations, the concept of ‘information cascade’ is all but univocal. Despite the fact tha...

Authors: Raquel A Baños, Javier Borge-Holthoefer and Yamir Moreno

Probing crowd density through smartphones in city-scale mass gatherings

City-scale mass gatherings attract hundreds of thousands of pedestrians. These pedestrians need to be monitored constantly to detect critical crowd situations at an early stage and to mitigate the risk that si...

Authors: Martin Wirz, Tobias Franke, Daniel Roggen, Eve Mitleton-Kelly, Paul Lukowicz and Gerhard Tröster

The dynamics of health behavior sentiments on a large online social network

Modifiable health behaviors, a leading cause of illness and death in many countries, are often driven by individual beliefs and sentiments about health and disease. Individual behaviors affecting health outcom...

Authors: Marcel Salathé, Duy Q Vu, Shashank Khandelwal and David R Hunter

Word usage mirrors community structure in the online social network Twitter

Language has functions that transcend the transmission of information and varies with social context. To find out how language and social network structure interlink, we studied communication on Twitter, a bro...

Authors: John Bryden, Sebastian Funk and Vincent AA Jansen

Lognormal distributions of user post lengths in Internet discussions - a consequence of the Weber-Fechner law?

The paper presents an analysis of the length of comments posted in Internet discussion fora, based on a collection of large datasets from several sources. We found that despite differences in the forum languag...

Authors: Pawel Sobkowicz, Mike Thelwall, Kevan Buckley, Georgios Paltoglou and Antoni Sobkowicz

Realities of data sharing using the genome wars as case study - an historical perspective and commentary

The importance of data sharing has become a mantra within the science research community. However, sharing has not been as easy (or as readily adopted) as advocates have suggested. Questions of privacy, indivi...

Authors: Barbara R Jasny

Link creation and information spreading over social and communication ties in an interest-based online social network

Complex dynamics of social media emerge from the interaction between the patterns of social connectivity of users and the information exchanged along such social ties. Unveiling the underlying mechanisms that ...

Authors: Luca Maria Aiello, Alain Barrat, Ciro Cattuto, Rossano Schifanella and Giancarlo Ruffo

Genetic flow directionality and geographical segregation in a Cymodocea nodosa genetic diversity network

We analyse a large data set of genetic markers obtained from populations of Cymodocea nodosa, a marine plant occurring from the East Mediterranean to the Iberian-African coasts in the Atlantic Ocean. We fully dev...

Authors: A Paolo Masucci, Sophie Arnaud-Haond, Víctor M Eguíluz, Emilio Hernández-García and Ester A Serrão

Spatiotemporal correlations of handset-based service usages

We study spatiotemporal correlations and temporal diversities of handset-based service usages by analyzing a dataset that includes detailed information about locations and service usages of 124 users over 16 m...

Authors: Hang-Hyun Jo, Márton Karsai, Juuso Karikoski and Kimmo Kaski

A large-scale community structure analysis in Facebook

Understanding social dynamics that govern human phenomena, such as communications and social relationships is a major problem in current computational social sciences. In particular, given the unprecedented succe...

Authors: Emilio Ferrara

Beating the news using social media: the case study of American Idol

We present a contribution to the debate on the predictability of social events using big data analytics. We focus on the elimination of contestants in the American Idol TV shows as an example of a well defined...

Authors: Fabio Ciulla, Delia Mocanu, Andrea Baronchelli, Bruno Gonçalves, Nicola Perra and Alessandro Vespignani

Crowd disasters as systemic failures: analysis of the Love Parade disaster

Each year, crowd disasters happen in different areas of the world. How and why do such disasters happen? Are the fatalities caused by relentless behavior of people or a psychological state of panic that makes ...

Authors: Dirk Helbing and Pratik Mukerji

Partisan asymmetries in online political activity

We examine partisan differences in the behavior, communication patterns and social interactions of more than 18,000 politically-active Twitter users to produce evidence that points to changing levels of partis...

Authors: Michael D Conover, Bruno Gonçalves, Alessandro Flammini and Filippo Menczer

Social dynamics of Digg

Online social media provide multiple ways to find interesting content. One important method is highlighting content recommended by user’s friends. We examine this process on one such site, the news aggregator ...

Authors: Tad Hogg and Kristina Lerman

Effects of time window size and placement on the structure of an aggregated communication network

Complex networks are often constructed by aggregating empirical data over time, such that a link represents the existence of interactions between the endpoint nodes and the link weight represents the intensity...

Authors: Gautier Krings, Márton Karsai, Sebastian Bernhardsson, Vincent D Blondel and Jari Saramäki

Positive words carry less information than negative words

We show that the frequency of word use is not only determined by the word length [1] and the average information content [2], but also by its emotional content. We have analyzed three established lexica of aff...

Authors: David Garcia, Antonios Garas and Frank Schweitzer

Long trend dynamics in social media

A main characteristic of social media is that its diverse content, copiously generated by both standard outlets and general users, constantly competes for the scarce attention of large audiences. Out of this f...

Authors: Chunyan Wang and Bernardo A Huberman

Editorial

Authors: F Schweitzer and A Vespignani