The SIAM-UKIE Annual e-Meeting 2021 will take place on zoom on Friday the 8th of January 2021, 2PM-3:30PM.
Registration is now open at this link.
The meeting will consist of a talk by Prof. James Gleeson (University of Limerick) followed by the Section business meeting. Title and abstract of the talk are detailed below.
Title: Branching processes as models of cascade dynamics on networks
Presenter: Prof James Gleeson, University of Limerick, Ireland
Abstract: Network models may be applied to describe many complex systems, and in the era of online social networks the study of dynamics on networks is an important branch of computational social science. Cascade dynamics can occur when the state of a node is affected by the states of its neighbours in the network, for example when a Twitter user is inspired to retweet a message that she received from a user she follows, with one event (the retweet) potentially causing further events (retweets by followers of followers) in a chain reaction. In this talk I will review some mathematical models that can help us understand how social contagion (the spread of cultural fads and the viral diffusion of information) depends upon the structure of the social network and on the dynamics of human behaviour. Although the models are simple enough to allow for mathematical analysis, I will show examples where they can also provide good matches to empirical observations of cascades on social networks.
SIAM UKIE Blog 