Events in MathSys and Complexity Science
This is a calendar page detailing events within the MathSys CDT. It also acts as a booking diary for the Seminar Room D1.07. To book D1.07 please email Sheetal.Sharma@warwick.ac.uk
Please note that your event booking is for D1.07 only. The adjacent common room is a private area for the MathSys Centre that cannot used as part of your booking.
MathSys CDT events have priority for D1.07 room bookings.
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Erasmus Mundus Visiting Scholar lecture: Bruno Goncalves (Northeastern)
Location: D1,07
Speaker: Bruno Goncalves (College of Computer and Information Sciences, Northeastern University)
Title: Individual and Collective Attention - Dunbar's Number and Online Popularity
Abstract:
Micro-blogging systems such as Twitter expose digital traces of social discourse with an unprecedented degree of resolution of individual behaviors. They offer an opportunity to investigate both individual and collective behavioral patterns and to disentangle the temporal, spatial and topical aspects of human activity.
We analyze a dataset of Twitter conversations collected across six months involving 1.7 million individuals and test the theoretical cognitive limit on the number of stable social relationships known as Dunbar’s number. We find that the data are in agreement with Dunbar’s result; users can entertain a maximum of 100–200 stable relationships. Thus, the ‘economy of attention’ is limited in the online world by cognitive and biological constraints as predicted by Dunbar’s theory.
We also analyze spikes of collective attention in Twitter, and specifically on peaks in the popularity of hashtags and find that the evolution of hashtag popularity over time defines discrete classes. Each dynamical classe is linked to the event it hashtags represents and by using text mining techniques we are able to provide a semantic characterization of the hashtag classes.