The Department of Informatics and Networked Systems (DINS) is pleased to invite you to join us for a stimulating series of lecture events, the DINS Seminar Series. Taking place regularly throughout the 2022-2023 Academic Year, the series will feature a variety of experts from academia and industry who will discuss their leading-edge work on topics at the intersections of information and data, organizations and society, and systems and networks. The breadth of topics covered in the series reflects the diversity of research and educational opportunities within the Department.
Our first presenter will be Dr. Michele Coscia, Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. Dr. Coscia will discuss "Quantifying Political Polarization on a Network Using Generalized Euclidean Distance" on Wednesday, October 19, 2022. This will be a virtual presentation and will take place from 11 am to 12 noon at: https://pitt.zoom.us/j/93599179854.
Abstract: An intensely debated topic these days is whether political polarization on social media is on the rise or not. This question can only be investigated if we have a measure for polarization. Such a measure should take into account how extreme the opinions of the people are, how much they organize into echo chambers, and how these echo chambers organize in the network. The most popular ways of estimating polarization are insensitive to at least one of these factors, thus they cannot conclusively clarify the opening question. We propose a measure of ideological polarization which can capture these factors. The measure is based on the Generalized Euclidean (GE) distance, which estimates the distance between two vectors on a network, e.g., vectors representing people’s opinion. This measure can fill the methodological gap left by the current state of the art, and leads to useful insights when applied to real-world debates happening on social media and to data from the US Congress.
For more details about this event, as well as other events in the series, please visit: www.dins.pitt.edu/dins-seminar-series-2022-23