Tag Archives: NaN

Awards at CCS 2015

October 5, 2015Fil, NaN, Newsaward, bots, CASCI, dynamical systems, dynamics, media, misinformation, modularity, NaN, papers, poster, socialfil

The CNetS poster “The Rise of Social Bots in Online Social Networks” by Emilio Ferrara, Onur Varol, Prashant Shiralkar, Clayton Davis, Filippo Menczer, and Alessandro Flammini won a Best Poster Award at CCS 2015. The poster was presented by Clayton Davis. The results will also appear in the paper “The Rise of Social Bots” to be published in Comm. ACM (in press, preprint).

The paper “Modularity and the Spread of Perturbations in Complex Dynamical Systems” by Artemy Kolchinsky, Alexander J. Gates and Luis M. Rocha, and the poster “Information Theoretic Structures of the French Revolution” by Alexander Barron, Simon DeDeo and Rebecca Spang won additional awards.

Finally, our former postdoctoral scientist Bruno Gonçalves (now tenured faculty member at Aix-Marseille Université) received a Junior Scientist Award from the Complex Systems Society for his contributions to the study of human social behavior from large-scale online attention and behavioral data. This is the second Junior Scientist Award for CNetS (the first was won by Filippo Radicchi).

Congratulations to the CNetS team!

CNetS research at CCS’15

June 16, 2015Fil, NaN, NewsCASCI, computational social science, control, dynamical systems, information theory, modularity, NaN, papers, polarization, social media, talksferrarae

Big success for CNetS researchers at the Conference on Complex Systems (CCS’15)! Here are the accepted talks from our center:

Computational fact checking from knowledge networks by Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Prashant Shiralkar, Johan Bollen, Luis M Rocha, Filippo Menczer and Alessandro Flammini
Control of complex networks requires structure and dynamics by Alexander Gates and Luis M. Rocha
Darwin’s Semantic Voyage by Jaimie Murdock, Simon DeDeo, and Colin Allen
Defining and Identifying Sleeping Beauties in Science by Qing Ke, Emilio Ferrara, Filippo Radicchi and Alessandro Flammini
Detecting conflict in social unrest using Instagram^* by Rion Brattig Correia, Kwan Nok Chan and Luis M. Rocha
Detecting Campaigns in Social Media by Onur Varol, Emilio Ferrara, Filippo Menczer and Alessandro Flammini
Discourse Polarization in the US Congress by Rion Brattig Correia, Kwan Nok Chan and Luis M. Rocha
Eigenmood Twitter Analysis: measuring collective mood variation by Ian B. Wood, Joana Gonçalves-Sá, Johan Bollen and Luis M. Rocha
Evolution of Online User Behavior During a Social Upheaval by Onur Varol, Emilio Ferrara, Christine Ogan, Filippo Menczer and Alessandro Flammini
How human perception of the urban environment influences the abandonment process by Stefani Crabstree, Simon DeDeo
Information theoretic structures of the French Revolution by Alexander Barron, Simon DeDeo, and Rebecca Spang
Measuring Emotional Contagion in Online Social Networks by Zeyao Yang, Emilio Ferrara
Modularity and the Spread of Perturbations in Complex Dynamical Systems^* by Artemy Kolchinsky, Alexander J. Gates and Luis M. Rocha
On Predictability of Rare Events Leveraging Social Media by Lei Le, Emilio Ferrara and Alessandro Flammini
Optimal network modularity for information diffusion by Azadeh Nematzadeh, Emilio Ferrara, Alessandro Flammini and Yong-Yeol Ahn
Redundancy and control in complex networks by Luis M. Rocha
The Rise of Social Bots in Online Social Networks by Emilio Ferrara, Onur Varol, Prashant Shiralkar, Clayton Davis, Filippo Menczer and Alessandro Flammini

Simon DeDeo will also deliver one of the plenary talks. ^*Denotes papers “starred”, or designated as especially worthwhile by the CCS15 program committee.

In addition, CNetS researchers presented several papers at the recent NetSci, ICCSS, CAP 2015, CSCW, YTH Live, WWW, and ICCS conferences. Congratulations!

Truthy Team Wins WICI Data Challenge

July 8, 2013Fil, NaN, Newsdata, information networks, NaN, networks, Truthy, Twitter, visualizationfil

Congratulations to Przemyslaw Grabowicz, Luca Aiello, and Fil Menczer for winning the WICI Data Challenge. A prize of $10,000 CAD accompanies this award from the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation at the University of Waterloo. The Challenge called for tools and methods that improve the exploration, analysis, and visualization of complex-systems data. The winning entry, titled Fast visualization of relevant portions of large dynamic networks, is an algorithm that selects subsets of nodes and edges that best represent an evolving graph and visualizes it either by creating a movie, or by streaming it to an interactive network visualization tool. The algorithm is deployed in the movie generation tool of the Truthy system, which allows users to create, in near-real time, YouTube videos that illustrate the spread and co-occurrence of memes on Twitter. Przemek and Luca worked on this project while visiting CNetS in 2011 and collaborating with the Truthy team. Bravo!

Great Minds Think Alike

June 18, 2011Fil, NaN, Newsgame, givealink, NaN, tagfil

Check out the Great Minds Think Alike game for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. It is a word association game that lets users build semantic concept networks and explore similarity relations between people and media content. Starting from a single word, the player builds a chain of words by selecting semantically related terms. Get the game from the App Store!

Congratulations Jacob!

May 2, 2011Fil, NaNNaNfil

Dr. Jacob

Congratulations to Dr. Jacob Ratkiewicz! Jacob successfully defended his dissertation titled The Expression of Human Behavior in Online Networks on May 2, 2011 and will take a position at Google in July. We will miss him!

Truthy tool identifies smear tactics on Twitter

October 25, 2010Fil, NaN, Newsepidemic modeling, information networks, NaN, politics, Twitterfil

Astroturfers, Twitter-bombers and smear campaigners need beware this election season as a group of leading Indiana University information and computer scientists today unleashed Truthy.indiana.edu, a sophisticated new Twitter-based research tool that combines data mining, social network analysis and crowdsourcing to uncover deceptive tactics and misinformation leading up to the Nov. 2 elections. Combing through thousands of tweets per hour in search of political keywords, the team based out of IU’s School of Informatics and Computing will isolate patterns of interest and then insert those memes (ideas or patterns passed by imitation) into Twitter’s application programming interface (API) to obtain more information about the meme’s history.

In the run-up to the mid-term elections, Truthy uncovered a number of abuses such as robot-driven traffic to politician websites and networks of bot accounts controlled by individuals to promote fake news. These findings have been widely covered in the press, with mentions in The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, PC World, New Scientist, NPR, Ars Technica, Fast Company, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, and many other media. Read more here and here.

Ruj Akavipat earns PhD

December 18, 2009Fil, NaNNaN, securityfil

Congratulations to Ruj — er, Dr. Akavipat who successfully defended his dissertations on reputation systems for peer search networks, earning his PhD!