Maciej Pawlik
supervisor: Janusz Hołyst
In the age of social media there is more and more need to understand how do people create relations using those. The objective here was not only to look if relations are being created as a consequence of social interactions, but also to separate emergence of positive and negative relations. The knowledge we can gain here could benefit a wide spectrum of applications - from purely scientific to business.
In this work two datasets were used - Epinions and NetHealth. Epinions was a site where users could upload reviews of goods, vote on others reviews and declare trust/distrust towards users. The trust network was used to develop a network of polarized relations and votes were treated as interactions. In NetHealth experiment students were asked, among other information, to declare people, with whom they have been in their opinion interacting more in last months. 8 such surveys were delivered within 4 years. Researchers were also tracking smartphone communication – calls, SMS, MMS and WhatsApp messages, which were used as interactions by us. Neutral relations were also possible and they were used as a benchmark for comparing with positive and negative relations. It was also important to filter out relations, which were developed before students had the opportunity to declare them, e.g. families. This research focuses on interactions exchanged before the relation was established.
This research received funding from National Science Centre, Poland Grant No. 2019/01/Y/ST2/00058.