Tuesday June 11th, 11am-12pm, Torino Room
Janos Kertesz: Tie-strength and structure in a huge social network
Abstract - We consider a network constructed from the data of mobile phone conversations as a proxy for a weighted societal network: Individuals are the nodes (vertices), mutual calls are the links (edges) and the accumulated call durations serve as the weights of the links representing the intensities of social ties. We observe a coupling between interaction strengths and the network's local structure in good agreement with Granovetter's hypothesis. As a consequence we find that social networks are robust to the removal of the strong ties but fall apart in a percolation transition if the weak ties are removed. We show that this structure results in a dynamic trapping of information and give hints to increase efficiency of information spreading.
