0000000000208106
AUTHOR
Alexander G. Nikolaev
showing 9 related works from this author
Do social networks bridge political divides? The analysis of VKontakte social network communication in Ukraine
2014
New electronic forms of political communication have become increasingly popular in countries with weak democratic institutions. The effectiveness of these new forms of association in altering political behavior, however, remains uncertain even in developed democratic regimes. This paper investigates connections between regional variation in electoral behavior and regional distribution of electronic social networks in the case of Ukraine's polarized and institutionally unstable democracy. Our analysis of online networks shows that, somewhat contrary to conventional wisdom, electronic communication does not bridge political divides. This finding casts doubt on the effectiveness of online for…
Violent Conflict and Online Segregation: An Analysis of Social Network Communication Across Ukraine's Regions
2016
Does the intensity of a social conflict affect political division? Traditionally, social cleavages are seen as the underlying cause of political conflicts. It is clear, however, that a violent conflict itself can shape partisan, social, and national identities. In this paper, we ask whether social conflicts unite or divide the society by studying the effects of Ukraine's military conflict with Russia on online social ties between Ukrainian provinces (oblasts). In order to do that, we collected original data on the cross-regional structure of politically relevant online communication among users of VKontakte social networking site. We analyze the panel of provinces spanning the most active p…
Exploring social media network landscape of post-Soviet space
2019
The “post-Soviet space” consists of countries with a substantial fraction of the world’s population; however, unlike many other regions, its social media network landscape is still somewhat under-explored. This paper aims at filling this gap. To this purpose, we use anonymized data on user friendships at VK.com (also known as VKontakte and, informally, as “Russian Facebook”), which is the largest and most popular social media portal in the post-Soviet space with hundreds of millions of user accounts. Using the VK network snapshots from October 2015 to December 2016, we conduct a “multiscale” empirical study of this network by considering conn…
Analysis of Viral Advertisement Re-Posting Activity in Social Media
2016
More and more businesses use social media to advertise their services. Such businesses typically maintain online social network accounts and regularly update their pages with advertisement messages describing new products and promotions. One recent trend in such businesses’ activity is to offer incentives to individual users for re-posting the advertisement messages to their own profiles, thus making it visible to more and more users. A common type of an incentive puts all the re-posting users into a random draw for a valuable gift. Understanding the dynamics of user engagement into the re-posting activity can shed light on social influence mechanisms and help determine the optimal incentiv…
Online activity traces around a "Boston bomber"
2013
This paper describes traces of user activity around a alleged online social network profile of a Boston Marathon bombing suspect, after the tragedy occurred. The analyzed data, collected with the help of an automatic social media monitoring software, includes the perpetrator's page saved at the time the bombing suspects' names were made public, and the subsequently appearing comments left on that page by other users. The analyses suggest that a timely protection of online media records of a criminal could help prevent a large-scale public spread of communication exchange pertaining to the suspects/criminals' ideas, messages, and connections.
Network-based indices of individual and collective advising impacts in mathematics
2020
AbstractAdvising and mentoring Ph.D. students is an increasingly important aspect of the academic profession. We define and interpret a family of metrics (collectively referred to as “a-indices”) that can potentially be applied to “ranking academic advisors” using the academic genealogical records of scientists, with the emphasis on taking into account not only the number of students advised by an individual, but also subsequent academic advising records of those students. We also define and calculate the extensions of the proposed indices that account for student co-advising (referred to as “adjusted a-indices”). In addition, we extend some of the proposed metrics to ranking universities a…
Sampled Fictitious Play on Networks
2019
We formulate and solve the problem of optimizing the structure of an information propagation network between multiple agents. In a given space of interests (e.g., information on certain targets), each agent is defined by a vector of their desirable information, called filter, and a vector of available information, called source. The agents seek to build a directed network that maximizes the value of the desirable source-information that reaches each agent having been filtered en route, less the expense that each agent incurs in filtering any information of no interest to them. We frame this optimization problem as a game of common interest, where the Nash equilibria can be attained as limit…
Seed Activation Scheduling for Influence Maximization in Social Networks
2018
This paper addresses the challenge of strategically maximizing the influence spread in a social network, by exploiting cascade propagators termed “seeds”. It introduces the Seed Activation Scheduling Problem (SASP) that chooses the timing of seed activation under a given budget, over a given time horizon, in the presence/absence of competition. The SASP is framed as a blogger-centric marketing problem on a two-level network, where the decisions are made to buy sponsored posts from prominent bloggers at calculated points in time. A Bayesian evidence diffusion model – the Partial Parallel Cascade (PPC) model – allows the network nodes to be partially activated, proportional to their accumulat…
Engagement as a Driver of Growth of Online Health Forums: Observational Study
2017
Background: The emerging research on nurturing the growth of online communities posits that it is in part attributed to network effects, wherein every increase in the volume of user-generated content increases the value of the community in the eyes of its potential new members. The recently introduced metric engagement capacity offers a means of quantitatively assessing the ability of online platform users to engage each other into generating content; meanwhile, the quantity engagement value is useful for quantifying communication-based platform use. If the claim that higher engagement leads to accelerated growth holds true for online health forums (OHFs), then engagement tracking should be…