A Study of Information Diffusion over a Realistic Social Network Model

—Sociological models of human behavior can explain population-level phenomena within social systems; computer modeling can simulate a wide variety of scenarios and allow one to pose and test hypotheses about the social system. Here we model and examine the spread of information through personal conversations in a simulated socio-technical network that provides a high degree of realism and a great deal of captured detail. To our knowledge this is the first time information spread via conversation has been modeled against a statistically accurate simulation of people’s daily interactions within a specific urban or rural environment, capturing the points in time and space at which two people could converse, and providing a realistic basis for modeling human behavior during face-to-face interaction. We use a probabilistic model to decide whether two people will converse about a particular topic based on their similarity and familiarity. Similarity is modeled by matching selected demo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CSE
• Authors: Andrea Apolloni, Karthik Channakeshava, Lisa Durbeck, Maleq Khan, Chris Kuhlman, Bryan Lewis, Samarth Swarup
• Keywords: Computer Science And Engineering, CSE 2009, Human Behavior, Simulated Socio-technical Network, Social System