Join us as Neukom's own Gwen Spencer gives a talk on

Influence Beyond Exposure: Tackling an Economic Variant of Seeding Viral
Spread

Wednesday, April 9th, 6:30 PM in Kemeny 004

Abstract: The problem of seeding "contagion" in social networks has
attracted substantial attention for its connection to viral marketing.
Simple information-spread models yield nice mathematical properties that
allow theoretical algorithmic traction. This work often points to some form
of "exposure" as the best paradigm for designing seed sets. While
exposure-based seeding may spread awareness effectively, being aware of a
behavior often doesn't result in a decision to adopt it. When environmental
economists describe decisions to engage in green behaviors, when
sociologists model norm-spread, and when game theorists consider choices to
adopt cooperative strategies in repeated-game-play, a common more-complex
spread mechanism emerges.  What can we learn about how to virally market
biking to work, adopting health-related behaviors, and cooperating at an
equilibrium that is mutually beneficial?

I'll mention convergence results for this spread mechanism, (daunting)
hardness results for the seeding question, and (heartening) computational
results from heuristics derived by truncating an exact (inefficient)
Integer Program.   Compared to exposure-based seeding, the advantage of a
seeding paradigm that establishes "critical mass locally" appears largest
when the network is highly clustered (as social networks often are).

Visit http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/~siamchapter/index.html for more info.

There will be pizza!