Moehlis & Bullo - Bio-inspired Information Propagation and Opinion Dynamics in Social Networks

An example of the topology of interactions between agents, labeled xi, in a heterogeneous social network.

TEAM
Bio-Inspired Network Science

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Living in the information-rich world of the 21st century, we are members of various social networks which share compelling similarities with networks of social organisms such as some types of insects and schooling fish. To understand the dynamics and influence of such networks, it is crucial to understand how information propagates, evolves, and may be corrupted within them, and how dominant viewpoints and opinions emerge based on the network structure. Our work characterizes the spread of information in complex social networks, analyzes opinion dynamics models for heterogeneous social networks, and designs distributed techniques to detect misbehaving agents, to identify corrupted information, and to re-establish proper interaction among the social agents.