Networks are a diverse and increasingly important area of research for Penn State. Network researchers are active across the University, sharing common interests in understanding, manipulating, and exploiting the properties of networks.
Example networks of interest include metabolic processes of a cell, social interactions of teenagers, supply chains of businesses, computers on the Internet, contact vectors in disease transmission, and environmental sensors deployed on a mountainside. Penn State researchers are active in the study of all of these research topics and many more. Networks offer a new unifying paradigm for these researchers, as scientific tools, as conceptual frameworks, and as topics for study themselves; network researchers from across all disciplines can benefit enormously from intellectual cross-fertilization.
The Network Science Initiative is supported by multiple research institutes at Penn State including the
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Thursday, Oct 20, 2011
Speaker: Marcel Salathe, Department of Biology and Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics.
Title: The dynamics of vaccination sentiments on Twitter: from community
structure to social contagion
Abstract:
There is great interest in the dynamics of health behaviors in social
networks and how they affect collective public health outcomes, but
measuring population health behaviors over time and space requires
substantial resources. We used publicly available data from 101,853
users of online social media collected over a time period of almost
six months to measure the spatio-temporal sentiment towards a new
vaccine. We validated our approach by identifying a strong correlation
between sentiments expressed online and CDC-estimated vaccination
rates by region. Analysis of the network of opinionated users showed
that information flows more often between users who share the same
sentiments - and less often between users who do not share the same
sentiments - than expected by chance alone. We also found that most
communities are dominated by either positive or negative sentiments
towards the novel vaccine. Simulations of infectious disease
transmission show that if clusters of negative vaccine sentiments lead
to clusters of unprotected individuals, the likelihood of disease
outbreaks is greatly increased. I'll summarize these results, recently
published in PLoS Computational Biology
Assessing Vaccination Sentiments with Online Social Media: Implications for Infectious Disease Dynamics and Control ,
and I will show results from current ongoing analysis that tries to
understand to what extent sentiments of vaccinations were contagious
on the online social network.
*** lunch is provided ***
A list of all seminars hosted by the Network Science Initiative.
Penn State has the opportunity to evolve into a position of globally recognized leadership in network research. Toward this, we seek the addition of new faculty members who work in the interdisciplinary areas of network research, and who can bridge the diverse interests of different colleges.
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Seminar Series
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Researchers
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Complex networks of interactions among multiple entities are essential features
of the natural world, human society, and modern technology.
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The objective of the Penn State Network Science curricula is to
familiarize students with the theory, research and methodological
issues connected with network analysis in various domains of application:
social, biological, theoretical and/or engineering contexts
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Details on the Penn State Network Science Initiative: Lecture Series • 2010 Network Science Day • Table of Contents
The lunchtime Network Science seminar series is starting again. See you on
Thursdays at noon, every other week.
Lunch is provided.
Network Science research at Penn State is involving interdisciplinary teams
of scholars from across the University.