DYNAMICS OF ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS
Mathematical models for the analysis of spread of social influence have emerged as a major topic of interest among the researchers in diverse disciplines such as sociology, economics and computer science. Empirical studies of diffusion on social networks date back to the 1940s. Later on, theoretical propagation models were introduced in late 1970s. In the recent years, Online Social Networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin has experienced explosive growth and these have remarkably changed the way people communicate. Inherently, study of the dynamics of these networks using partial differential equation(PDE) based has attracted many researchers.
Critical Expectations
Events, issues, interests, etc. happening across the globe, evolve very quickly in social networks. Given the impact of online social networks on society, the recent focus is on extracting valuable information from this huge amount of data. Some critical expectation from both end users and researchers are:
capture data understanding visualization predictions
Dynamics of the Online Social Network(OSN)s depends on information diffusion and when we focus on information diffusion in OSNs, that raises the following questions :
– which pieces of information or topics are popular and diffuse the most, how, why and through which paths information is diffusing, and will be diffused in the future,
– which members of the network play important roles in the spreading process?
