Persona Vectors: Monitoring and Controlling Character Traits in Language Models Large language models interact with users through a simulated 'Assistant' persona. While the Assistant is typically trained to be helpful, harmless, and honest, it sometimes deviates from these ideals...

Persona Vectors paper has been going viral in my community.
arxiv.org/abs/2507.21509

The authors of the original paper have posted their reply to the comment paper.

arxiv.org/abs/2506.18600

Diffusion of complex contagions is shaped by a trade-off between reach and reinforcement | PNAS How does social network structure amplify or stifle behavior diffusion? Existing theory suggests that when social reinforcement makes the adoption ...

Very pleased our paper looking at the diffusion of complex contagions is out in @pnas.org www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Reading system prompt of Claude 4

github.com/elder-pliniu...

Great network science class I wish I could have taken:
asmithh.github.io/network-scie...

How media competition fuels the spread of misinformation Game-theoretic modeling shows that media competition over public opinion incentivizes news sources to spread more misinformation.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

My Advisor, Her AI and Me: Evidence from a Field Experiment on Human-AI Collaboration and Investment Decisions Amid ongoing policy and managerial debates on keeping humans in the loop of AI decision-making, we investigate whether human involvement in AI-based service production benefits downstream consumers. P...

GenAI seems to be a good adviser. So it is obvious which jobs in academia will be replaced by it.

Forthcoming Magnagement Science paper:
arxiv.org/abs/2506.03707

The very interesting discussion has begun.
arxiv.org/abs/2505.23796

Rumor propagation on hypergraphs The rapid spread of information and rumors through social media platforms, especially in group settings, motivates the need for more sophisticated models of rumor propagation. Traditional pairwise mod...

arxiv.org/abs/2504.19305

Research citations building trust in Wikipedia: Results from a survey of published authors The use of Wikipedia citations in scholarly research has been the topic of much inquiry over the past decade, however little is known regarding perceived Researchers trustworthiness of Wikipedia citat...

Researchers whose work is cited in Wikipedia generally trust the platform’s representation of their research. Wikipedia is increasingly seen as a valuable gateway to scholarly work.

doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Today’s manga artists mostly read manga—and end up making more of the same. Tezuka didn’t. Miyazaki barely watches anime. So, what about researchers? Can reading papers every day really lead to innovative research?

Academia’s biggest paradox: everyone sees their own reviews as polite and precise, yet reviewer's comments on their own papers often reads like clueless nitpicking.

Stylized map of Detroit (MI) showing the highway network, and the network of social connections between urban residents. The connections intersecting highways are sparser than elsewehere. Image credit Karo Berghuber (Insta: @kariot.lines)

"Urban Highways Are Barriers to Social Ties" out on PNAS!
The 1st large-scale measure of how highways weaken social connections between the communities they separate. This barrier effect is strong in the 50 largest US cities--especially for low-income Black communities.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Expertise diversity of teams predicts originality and long-term impact in science and technology Despite the growing importance of teams in producing innovative and high-impact science and technology, it remains unclear how expertise diversity among team members relates to the originality and imp...

Expertise diversity of teams predicts originality and long-term impact in science and technology arxiv.org/abs/2210.04422

Propaganda & Disinformation - Level 1 (Beginners) Understand how manipulative propaganda and new technologies can be used to influence our world

Beginners Propaganda and Disinformation course - Udemy: www.udemy.com/course/propa...

Untangling the hairball using statistical inference – Tiago P. Peixoto Inverse Complexity Lab

"The seductive futility of network visualization"

skewed.de/lab/posts/ha...

Echoes of authenticity: Reclaiming human sentiment in the large language model era Abstract. This paper scrutinizes the unintended consequences of employing large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT for editing user-generated content (UGC

academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

The #IC2S2 2025 abstract submission closes next Monday, Feb 24, at 23:59 (AoE). Don’t miss out—submit your abstract now!

I notice that the submission deadline for IC2S2 2025 is February 24, 2025, at 12:00 AM UTC-0.

⚠️ We are accepting submissions for the OSNEM special issue on Disinformation, toxicity, harms in Online Social Networks and Media

🗓️ submit by 31st March 2025!

www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

🚨 Call for Papers! 🚨
We’re excited to announce the 6th International Workshop on Cyber Social Threats hashtag#CySoc2025 that will be held at hashtag#ICWSM2025 in Denmark! 🎉

🌍 Spotlight Topic: "Political Conflicts in Online Platforms in the Era of Gen-AI."

📅 Submission Deadline: March 31, 2025

🚨 Call for Papers 🚨
We are organizing a Special Issue on "Risks and Unintended Harms of Generative AI Systems" at ACM TIST!

More details here: dl.acm.org/journal/tist...

Deadline: May 31, 2025 (review on a rolling basis)

#LLM #misinformation #disinformation #AI #genAI

Many studies explore success, but how many truly address luck? Though some models treat ideas or grants as random, we rarely admit how much luck really matters. Even if statistics account for randomness, luck stays hidden—an inconvenient truth we often overlook.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

How Well Can Large Language Models Reflect? A Human Evaluation of LLM-generated Reflections for Motivational Interviewing Dialogues Erkan Basar, Xin Sun, Iris Hendrickx, Jan de Wit, Tibor Bosse, Gert-Jan De Bruijn, Jos A. Bosch, Emiel Krahmer. Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics. 2025.

aclanthology.org/2025.coling-...

I have been experimenting with DeepSeek locally, letting them chat with each other.

Evolution of sample-based music authorship network - EPJ Data Science Sample-based music—characterized by the adoption of extant audio fragments (sampling) in its creation process—plays an essential role in contemporary popular music, fostering inter-generational connec...

Evolution of sample-based music authorship network epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10....

Concentration in Governance Control Across Decentralised Finance Protocols Blockchain-based systems are frequently governed through tokens that grant their holders voting rights over core protocol functions and funds. The centralisation occurring in Decentralised Finance (De...

First preprint/paper of Thomas, co-supervised by Carlo Campajola and in collaboration with Claudio Tessone.
arxiv.org/abs/2501.13377

Recently, I've been browsing ACM Journals and have realized just how interdisciplinary they are.

dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

From Occasional to Steady: Habit Formation Insights From a Comprehensive Fitness Study Exercising regularly is widely recognized as a cornerstone of health, yet the challenge of sustaining consistent exercise habits persists. Understanding the factors that influence the formation of the...

The term 'habit formation' brings to mind advanced macroeconomics classes from my graduate school days. (A long long time ago)

arxiv.org/abs/2501.01779

Estimating Industrial Activity in the Arctic Using Light

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...