Homophily is the theory behind the formation of social ties between individuals with similar characteristics or interests. Based on homophily, in a social network it is expected to observe a higher degree of homogeneity among connected than disconnected people. Many researchers use this simple yet effective principal to infer users’ missing information and interests based on the information pro...

Homophily is the theory behind the formation of social ties between individuals with similar characteristics or interests. Based on homophily, in a social network it is expected to observe a higher degree of homogeneity among connected than disconnected people. Many researchers use this simple yet effective principal to infer users’ missing information and interests based on the information pro...

Humans are unique among all species of terrestrial history in both ecological dominance and individual properties. Many, or perhaps all, of the unique elements of this nonpareil status can be plausibly interpreted as evolutionary and strategic elements and consequences of the unprecedented intensity and scale of our social cooperation. Convincing explanation of this unique human social adaptati...

Abstract This paper is about rational sociality. Retaining rational choice as its basic framework, it aims to enrich it by taking seriously a well-established cultural, social and psychological phenomenon: that some inter-personal relationships have intrinsic value. These are termed primary. Because of the risk of adverse instrumental outcomes, agents offer primary relationships on certain term...

Network embedding fills the gap of applying tuple-based data mining models to networked datasets through learning latent representations or embeddings. However, it may not be likely to associate latent embeddings with physical meanings just as the name, latent embedding, literally suggests. Hence, models built on embeddings may not be interpretable. In this paper, we thus propose to learn ident...

The wide adoption of social media has increased the competition among ideas for our finite attention. We employ a parsimonious agent-based model to study whether such a competition may affect the popularity of different memes, the diversity of information we are exposed to, and the fading of our collective interests for specific topics. Agents share messages on a social network but can only pay...

In social science (and beyond of course), disagreement and debate are ubiquitous. Within IR there was for example the interparadigm debate and, more recently, the controversy between positivists and critical realists. Scholars commonly feel they need to take stance in these discussions, but often lack understanding of the exact nature of the disagreement they are having. For what exactly is at ...

My ultimate aim in the first sections of this book is to present Habermas’ mature social theory, his two-tiered theory of society as system and lifeworld, and to show how this theory, after the pattern of classical critical theory, serves to point out and articulate the interests of groups who embody a potential for protest or resistance within the societal formation of advanced capitalism. On ...