Julia Neidhardt’s talk will take place at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna in Room 201.
If you are interested in participating, please email to office@csh.ac.at
Abstract:
Web-based phenomena such as fake news, hate speech or echo chambers have been gaining increasing attention in the public discourse. However, the extent and actual impact of these phenomena are still unknown. In order to address these issues in more depth, it is important to understand how opinions emerge, change and get exchanged. In our work, we therefore intend to develop data-driven approaches to examine social influence mechanisms and opinion forming at a large scale.
We aim, in particular, to introduce a complex user model, which characterizes each person with respect to three levels: 1) the individual level capturing the characteristics of a user; 2) the network level capturing the social relationships of a user; and 3) the group level describing sets of similar users with certain dominant opinions and high-level ideologies. We introduce the concepts based on a rich and unique dataset of an online news forum that contains the complete posting history of all users, their detailed behaviors and interactions as well as all news articles and the respective meta data for almost two decades.
Short Bio:
Julia Neidhardt is a researcher at the division of E-Commerce at TU Wien. She holds a Master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Vienna and a PhD in Computer Science from TU Wien. Her research focuses on modeling and predicting complex human behavior, user preferences and social relations as well as their dynamics in digital-enabled environments. Current projects are concerned with social influence in online communities, the emergence and diffusion of topics, opinions and sentiments, picture-based travel recommender systems, and social media-based event prediction. Since 2013, she has been regularly visiting the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) research group at Northwestern University, USA.