FASS Seminar by Onur Varol

FASS SEMINAR

Modeling individual and group behavior in complex interactive systems

by

 ONUR VAROL

DECEMBER 02, 2020

 12:45-13:45

https://sabanciuniv.zoom.us/j/97611888890?pwd=TGRRUkx2SzVNREJlNFR5eXhIZVVaZz09
Meeting ID: 976 1188 8890
Passcode: sabancı

Abstract: The unprecedented increase in social media use and the large-scale collection of information poses new threats as well as bringing new opportunities. Modeling and managing complex interactive systems require mining of social and technological signals for new insights into human society and individual behavior. Online social networks have been taking an essential part in our access to information and it acts as a good proxy for studying population-level behavioral patterns and making individual-level predictions. In this talk, I will be presenting my research on analyzing various account behaviors from social bots disseminating misinformation to human venting their emotions to their friends. First, I will present Botometer, a platform for detecting social bots, that is widely adopted in academia and industry to study the dissemination of misinformation and characterization of automated behavior. Using estimations by Botometer, I will show how bot activities have effects on information spread, and I will demonstrate our results on estimating the prevalence of social bots and anomalous patterns captured among popular accounts investigated. Later I will demonstrate how we can leverage social media to study the evolution of human emotions in a minute-scale resolution at the population scale. I will conclude my talk by presenting results on the ego-centric analysis of individual well-being through analyzing sleep and online self-reports and explain how these projects are instrumental for my research agenda to model interactions between well-being, online and offline activities, and various biological information.