Modeling the Spread of Opinions, Behaviors and Contagious Diseases
The availability of massive amounts of human behavior data has the potential to revolutionize traditional social sciences.
The goal of this project is to model how 'things' spread through society, for example,
- political opinions and news (political science)
- spread of obesity and health-related behaviors (public healthcare)
- contagious diseases (epidemiology)
- viral media and music
Our approach is to use 'socially aware' mobile phones to capture face to face interactions and communication patterns for different types of communities.
This paper outlines our philosophy:
Alex Pentland et al. Computational Social Science. Science, Vol. 323, February, 2009 (link)
Future of Networks: "Social Sensing to Model the Evolution of Opinions"
Anmol Madan speaks about recent work identifying patterns of 'dynamic homophily' in political networks
Engaging Data: "Reality Mining: The End of Personal Privacy?"
Ben Waber and Anmol Madan speak about the privacy implications of capturing human interaction data
The Social Evolution Project is part of the Human Dynamics Group at the MIT Media Lab
News & Events
19th-21st May 2010:
Upcoming talk at Political Networks Conference at Duke University
11th-14th May 2010:
Upcoming talk (political opinions) and posters (epidimiology and obesity) at NetSci 2010
17th Mar 2010:
PhD defence presentation, Anmol Madan
24th Feb 2010:
Pecha-Kucha 16 talk at Mantra, Boston (more details)
15th Feb 2010
Updated papers and videos