Top Grant Module 2 for Huijuan Wang

Huijuan Wang will receive an NWO Top Grant Module for "Interaction Spreading Processes on Interdependent Social Networks".
There is an explosion of online social networks, each of which supports the dissemination of information, opinions and behavior, the so-called social contamination. The activity of a user in a network can affect not only the activities of his/her friends within that network, but also his/her activities in other networks. In the absence of insight into such interaction patterns between networks, we can not explain or control the rise of collective behavior, such as cascading failure, social unrest and the popularization of (mis)information, innovation and policy acceptance.

The overarching goal of Huijuan Wang is to discover and model the unknown mechanisms of the spread or contamination of user activities on interdependent networks and to provide fundamental insight into their emergent effect. This project will extend the boundaries of network science, which focuses on single theoretical scattering processes, by addressing the interaction between scattering processes that explains not only the average but also the diversity of user activities, ie the emergence of active users or networks, benchmarked by the data.