"Physics of Online Social Interactions: Quantitative Study of Collective Phenomena"

Abstract:

In recent years, interdisciplinary research of massive online communication data contributed to the birth of quantitative social science; these research activities provided evidence for the emergence of new collective phenomena on the Web, from sharing common emotion to coordinated efforts and cooperation leading to the collective knowledge. The source of all these phenomena is in human-to-human interactions with shared ``values'', where multiple factors such as the subject of communications, motivation to cooperate as well as technology that enables (or limits) it play a significant role. In this multidisciplinary strategies, the concepts of statistical physics are of fundamental importance. Firstly, physics theory provides with understanding the underlying stochastic processes through which the collective behavior arises from interactions at microscopic scale, and, secondly, the ways to quantify the emergent phenomena in analogy to the complex dynamical systems in the physics laboratory.
In this seminar, we illustrate some of the potentials of this approach in the actual case of the online chats data that concern a specific content (cognition). In the analysed example, the concepts of non-equilibrium statistical physics are complemented with the methods of text analysis and graph theory. Besides, an agent-based model of the online chat systems with an emotional robot is designed in order to explain the underlying dynamics further and demonstrate the potentialities to manage the collective behaviors by changing the parameters or actions at the microscopic level.