Events & News
Colloquium
| Category | Lecture |
| Date | Friday, November 9, 2012 |
| Time | 10:30 am |
| Concludes | 11:30 am |
| Location | Gould-Simpson 906 |
| Speaker | Jie Gao |
The Weakness of Long Ties in Social Networks – Revisited
It is a common understanding that the diffusion of disease and information is fast in social networks, due to the existence of weak ties and the property of small network diameter. However, recently sociologists started to study complex contagions, in which node activation requires multiple active neighbors. Weak ties are not as effective in spreading such complex contagions due to the lack of simultaneously active contacts. Here, their role relies heavily on the the way they are distributed in the network. In this paper we study several small world models and provide rigorous analysis on diffusion speed of a complex contagion. The main result is that complex contagion can still be fast (in polylogarithmic time) on Kleinberg's small world model but would be slow if the weak ties are not distributed properly as in Newman Watts Model.
Joint work with Golnaz Ghasemiesfeh and Roozbeh Ebrahimi, Stony Brook University.