Pitt Department of Informatics and Networked Systems Speaker Series

Title: Mediating Social Influence and Network Effects with Targeted Interventions, Descriptive Norms Messaging and Algorithmic Rewiring

Speaker: Amin Rahimian, PhD

Description: In this talk, Amin Rahimian will share several recent results from experiments on intervention design in social network contexts. In his upcoming paper “Seeding with Costly Network Information,” he and his colleagues present a unifying framework for data collection and targeted interventions with theoretical guarantees to trade off the cost of data collection with increasing intervention size. This talk will demonstrate the utility of this framework in analyzing privacy and fairness implications of data collection and intervention designs. Dr. Rahimian will also present results from a large, randomized experiment that shows messaging with accurate, descriptive norms can substantially increase intentions to accept a vaccine for COVID-19. He will share early results from an online experiment with a multiplayer collaborative prediction game and contextualize the potential shown from the experiment’s within-group effects for rewiring algorithms to enhance collective decision.

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