Rossano Schifanella

Updates

• New paper "People are Strange when you're a Stranger: Impact and Influence of Bots on Social Networks" accepted for publication at ICWSM'12. The paper will be also presented at CHASM'12
• New paper accepted for publication!
  L. M. Aiello, A. Barrat, R. Schifanella, C. Cattuto, B. Markines, F. Menczer
  Friendship prediction and homophily in social media
  In ACM Transaction on the Web (TWEB).
  [abstract]

  Web 2.0 applications have attracted a considerable amount of attention because their open-ended nature allows users to create lightweight semantic scaffolding to organize and share content. To date, the interplay of the social and semantic components of social media has been only partially explored. Here we explore the presence of homophily in three systems that comine tagging of social media with online social network. We find a substantial level of local semantic similarity among users who lie close to each other in the social network. We introduce a null model that preserves user activity while removing local correlations, allowing us to disentangle the actual local similarity between users from statistical effects due to the assortative mixing of user activity and centrality in the social network. This analysis suggests that users with similar interests are more likely to be friends, and therefore semantic similarity measures among users based solely on their annotation metadata should be predictive of social links. We test this hypothesis on several data sets, confirming that social networks constructed from semantic similarity capture actual friendship accurately.

• New paper accepted for publication!
  A. Panisson, A. Barrat, C. Cattuto, W. Van den Broeck, G. Ruffo, R. Schifanella
  On the Dynamics of Human Proximity for Data Diffusion in Ad-Hoc Networks
  In Ad Hoc Networks, Elsevier.
  [abstract]

  We report on a data-driven investigation aimed at understanding the dynamics of message spreading in a real-world dynamical network of human proximity. We use data collected by means of a proximity-sensing network of wearable sensors that we deployed at three different social gatherings, simultaneously involving several hundred individuals. We simulate a message spreading process over the recorded proximity network, focusing on both the topological and the temporal properties. We show that by using an appropriate technique to deal with the temporal hetero- geneity of proximity events, a universal statistical pattern emerges for the deliv- ery times of messages, robust across all the data sets. Our results are useful to set constraints for generic processes of data dissemination, as well as to validate established models of human mobility and proximity that are frequently used to simulate realistic behaviors.

• The Great Minds Think Alike iPhone game is now available on the Apple Store! Play with it!
  

About me

I'm an Assistant Professor at the Università degli Studi di Torino, Department of Computer Science, where I'm a member of the Applied Research on Computational Complex Systems (ARC²S) Group. I'm also a collaborator of the Networks & agents Network (NaN) group at the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing.

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+39 011 670 6797
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Dipartimento di Informatica
Universita' degli Studi di Torino
Corso Svizzera , 185
10149 Torino (Italy)

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