CMX Special Seminar

Diseases, rumors, memes, "alternative facts", and many other things spread on networks, whose structure has a significant effect on spreading processes. In this talk, I will give an introduction to spreading processes on networks. I will then discuss several types of "threshold" contagion models, in which spreading occurs when some kind of peer pressure matches or exceeds some kind of internal resistance of nodes. I will also briefly discuss other types of opinion models, such as bounded-confidence models (which were introduced originally to attempt to model how extremism can take root in a population).