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Talk by Yezekael Hayel

Title: Opinion dynamics in large social networks based on epidemics on graphs

Speaker: Yezekael Hayel, University of Avignon, France 

Venue: IEOR Teaching lab (ground floor) 

Date and Time: 23rd January 2018, 10.30 - 11.30am 

Abstract: Understanding propagation, spreading and epidemics over graphs  have several many application domains (industrial engineering, networking,  biology, social networks, ...). In this talk we consider a stochastic  propagation model in order to study opinion dynamics of agents in large  social networks. We are interested in a multi-leveled opinion of each  agent which is randomly influenced by the binary actions of its neighbors.  It is shown that, as far as the number of agents in the network is finite, the model asymptotically produces consensus. The consensus value  corresponds to one of the absorbing states of the associated Markov  system. However, when the number of agents is large, we emphasize that partial agreements are reached and these transient states are metastable, i.e., the expected persistence duration is arbitrarily large. These states  are characterized using an N-intertwined mean field approximation (NIMFA)  for the Markov system modeling the opinion dynamics. Numerical simulations  validate the proposed analysis. 

Bio: Yezekael Hayel (M’11, SM'17) received the M.Sc. degree in computer  science and applied mathematics from the University of Rennes 1, France, in 2002, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Rennes 1 and INRIA, France, in 2005. He has been an Assistant/Associate  Professor with the University of Avignon, France, since 2006. He has held  a tenure position (HDR) since 2013. He was a Visiting Professor with the  NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering from 2014 to 2015. He is currently the Head of the Computer Science/Engineering Institute at the University  of Avignon. His current research interests include performance evaluation  and optimization of networks based on game theoretic and queueing models,  with applications to communication/transportation and social networks,  such as wireless flexible networks, bio-inspired and self-organizing networks, and economic models of the Internet.
 

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