In this RCT of social contagion, we deployed a proven 22-month maternal and child health intervention, but we experimentally manipulated the fraction of people in each village who got the intervention and how those people were chosen.

Could we easily identify a subset of…

Social contagion is a powerful force.

People copy the thoughts, feelings, & actions of those to whom they are connected. Understanding social network structure & function makes it possible to use social contagion to intervene in the world to improve health, wealth, & learning.

Our work with social contagion and network targeting shifts the focus from the response to treatment among the treated to response to treatment among the untreated.

When one gives an intervention to the six orange people in this village, what does everyone else do in response?

I'd like to promote and highly recommend a workshop in complexity theory for graduate students which will be held at DIMACS and organized by Lijie Chen , Roei Tell, and Ryan Williams @[email protected] . More details can be found here: dimacs.rutgers.edu/events/details…
Deadline to apply: May 19

Lots of cool papers and fantastic local organizers!!

Long-Distance Connections Fast-Track Social Behaviors

Long ties—distant connections within social networks—dramatically enhance the spread of behaviors and ideas.

This challenges the previous notion that dense clusters of close-knit relationships are most effective for the…

A postdoctoral position is available in the Applied Algorithms Group of the Department of Computer Science at Rice University, hosted by Vova Braverman and me. We are looking for candidates with a broad interest in theoretical computer science and learning theory.

Hi everyone, see info about an interesting workshop at University of Michigan below!

I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining the University of Virginia in August as an Assistant Professor of Biology! I’m thrilled to be a part of UVa Biology and to be hired as part of the groundbreaking and cross-disciplinary Contagion Science program.

In a paper published for Nature Human Behaviour, a team of researchers including Amin Rahimian and Dean Eckles found that long-tie connections accelerate the speed of social contagion. news.engineering.pitt.edu/infected-under…

So nice to see Nature News & Views research briefing of W. Quattrociocchi Matteo Cinelli Andrea Baronchelli et al's @nature paper out last week. It does a great job summarizing the paper, which shows that long discussions online are the most toxic across platforms, topics & time: nature.com/articles/d4158…

'Algorithmically Mediating Communication to Enhance Collective Decision-Making in Online Social Networks' is out Collective Intelligence journal: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11… joint work with Jason Burton Abdullah Almaatouq | عبدالله المعتوق Ulrike Hahn, building on earlier results in ACM Collective Intelligence 2021

It’s an Earth Day miracle! The Cathedral of Learning has a new tiny addition! Carla and Ecco’s FIRST chick was spotted on camera at 11:30 am, marking the beginning of a new chapter in the family’s journey. Near-constant care from both parents is needed during the early days.

This new paper from Dean Eckles et al. counters recent findings that clustered networks are better at facilitating the spread of threshold-based contagions than randomly rewired networks. Amin Rahimian MIT IDSS University of Pittsburgh
nature.com/articles/s4156…