On 18 November 2020, we have the pleasure of inviting Dr. Bernard Brooks (RIT, USA), who is going to give a Seminar session on Rumour flow.

Understanding how unverified information or rumours flow through our social networks will enable us to regain some control over that flow; diminishing the negative and amplifying the truth. This seminar will review models of information flow (such as rumours and emotional contagions) on social networks. Metrics of importance will be introduced that can be used to rank people in the social network. With that ranking, influential people can be found in order to better target influence campaigns. We will learn which measure of importance is correlated to what desired marketing outcome. A metric of social integration will be introduced explaining the polarization in US politics.  We will develop two methods of generating artificial social networks that mimic the characteristics of real social networks and use those ideas to infer how some real-life networks might have been created. A method of partitioning networks into social cliques will be used to find sub-groups of people based on their connections in the social network. Using this partitioning method it will be possible to better target information campaigns designed to influence public opinion.

Dr. Bernard Brooks is a professor in the School of Mathematical Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Dr. Brooks earned his B.Sc. from the University of Toronto in Biology, Physics and Mathematics in 1991. In 1994 he received his M.Sc. in Biophysics and in 2000 his PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Guelph. Bernard earned his MBA in Finance from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2008.

Photo: RIT