Samuel Unicomb: Thursday 02/16/2017 at 17h.

Samuel is a new PhD student working with Eric Fleury and Marton Karsai. He propose to present a work entitled "Our friends are not equal: How heterogeneous social influence promotes or hinders behavioural cascades in complex networks".

Abstract:

Social influence is arguably one of the main driving mechanisms of many collective phenomena in society, including the spreading of innovations, ideas, fads, or social movements. Many of these processes have been modelled as complex contagion (where individual thresholds of social influence determine local adoption and global spreading, like the Watts model of adoption cascades). In these models social influence is commonly assumed to be homogeneous across ties in the network, while in reality it may vary from neighbour to neighbour, as it largely depends on the nature and frequency of interactions between acquaintances. We address this issue by studying a dynamical cascade model on weighted networks, where tie heterogeneities capture diversity in social influence.