*Please distribute to others who may be interested...* You are hereby invited to the next weekly seminar in our interdisciplinary series on Evolution, Complexity and Cognition<http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108>(ECCO) and theGlobal Brain Institute<http://www.globalbraininstitute.org/>(GBI).
*Time*:* Friday, June 7th, 14:00-16:00 p.m * *Place*: *Room 3B217 * (building B, level 3, From the elevator take the long corridor to the right, to its end), on the VUB Campus Etterbeek (Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels), Free entrance: everybody welcome! ------------------------------ Collective Emotions in the Internet Society *David Garcia* <http://www.sg.ethz.ch/team/people/dgarcia/> Abstract: Participatory media, like online fora or social networks, allow individual users to spontaneously reach and influence large amounts of other users. These pervasive communication technologies provide the breeding ground for the emergence of collective decisions and emotional states, which are not reducible to the behavior of individuals in isolation. In addition, the digital traces left my millions of users allow us to quantify and analyze such collective behavior at an unprecedented scale. Using such large datasets, we can test previous theories of individual and social behavior. For example, we empirically tested the Pollyanna hypothesis, finding a positive bias in emotional expression. Taking word context into account, this allowed us to measure the relation between information content and word valence, finding that positive words carry less information. Other datasources allow studies at collective levels, quantifying the behavior of whole societies. Using data from phone messages and calls during the Eurovision song contest, we measured the polarization between European countries, finding a strong correlation with economical indicators of the Euro debt crisis. Furthermore, this approach can shed light to the question of social resilience, which is the ability of a society to withstand external stresses. Using data from a range of successful and unsuccessful social networks, we are able to model and compare how each community reacts to environmental changes. Focusing on one of the biggest flops of online social networks, Friendster, we analyze the cascades of users taking the decision to leave the social network. References: Social resilience in online communities: The autopsy of Friendster D. Garcia, P. Mavrodiev, and F. Schweitzer (2013) http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.6109 Measuring cultural dynamics through the Eurovision song contest D. Garcia, and D. Tanase (2013) http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.2995 Positive words carry less information than negative words D. Garcia, A. Garas, and F. Schweitzer (2012) EPJ Data Science 1:3 http://www.epjdatascience.com/content/1/1/3 The speaker: I did my bachelor in informatics in Madrid, and then a master of theoretical computer science in ETH Zurich. I made my PhD in the Chair of Systems Design, which I finished last September with the title "Modeling collective emotions in online communities". I worked in the EU Cyberemotions project in collaboration with other 8 partners, combining big data analysis, psychology, statistical physics, and agent-based modeling to the question of emotions in online interaction. Currently I work as a postdoc for Frank Schweitzer, and I just got a Swiss SNF project funded on the topic of emotions and opinion polarization on political participatory media. ------------------------------ * Forthcoming ECCO/GBI seminars* *Summer 2013* * June 14 *Pierpaolo Andriani Modular Exaptation - Research policy <http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/203> * June 21 *Wolfgang Hofkirchner Global consciousness – the global brain in the perspective of a global sustainable information society * June 28 *Clement Vidal <http://clement.vidal.philosophons.com>(GBI,VUB) Distributing Cognition: from Local Brains to the Global Brain * July 5 * *NO SEMINAR * *July 12 *Marie-Lise Schläppy <[email protected]> (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale Lausanne) Are all gifted people also highly sensitive? <http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/204> More info about the ECCO seminar program: http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108 -- David R. Weinbaum (Weaver) ECCO/GBI Seminar Coordinator Email: [email protected] http://clea.academia.edu/DavidWeinbaum
