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  1. null (Ed.)
    Diffusion of information in social network has been the focus of intense research in the recent past decades due to its significant impact in shaping public discourse through group/individual influence. Existing research primarily models influence as a binary property of entities: influenced or not influenced. While this is a useful abstraction, it discards the notion of degree of influence, i.e., certain individuals may be influenced ``more'' than others. We introduce the notion of \emph{attitude}, which, as described in social psychology, is the degree by which an entity is influenced by the information. Intuitively, attitude captures the number of distinct neighbors of an entity influencing the latter. We present an information diffusion model (AIC model) that quantifies the degree of influence, i.e., attitude of individuals, in a social network. With this model, we formulate and study attitude maximization problem. We prove that the function for computing attitude is monotonic and sub-modular, and the attitude maximization problem is NP-Hard. We present a greedy algorithm for maximization with an approximation guarantee of $(1-1/e)$. In the context of AIC model, we study two problems, with the aim to investigate the scenarios where attaining individuals with high attitude is objectively more important than maximizing the attitude of the entire network. In the first problem, we introduce the notion of \emph{actionable attitude}; intuitively, individuals with actionable attitude are likely to ``act'' on their attained attitude. We show that the function for computing actionable attitude, unlike that for computing attitude, is non-submodular and however is \emph{approximately submodular}. We present approximation algorithm for maximizing actionable attitude in a network. In the second problem, we consider identifying the number of individuals in the network with attitude above a certain value, a threshold. In this context, the function for computing the number of individuals with attitude above a given threshold induced by a seed set is \emph{neither submodular nor supermodular}. We present heuristics for realizing the solution to the problem. We experimentally evaluated our algorithms and studied empirical properties of the attitude of nodes in network such as spatial and value distribution of high attitude nodes. 
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  2. He, Jing ; Purohit, Hemant ; Huang, Guangyan ; Gao, Xiaoying ; Deng, Ke (Ed.)
    We formulate and study the problem of identifying nodes whose absence can maximally disrupt network-diffusion under the independent cascade model. We refer to such nodes as critical nodes. We present the notion of impact and characterize critical nodes based on this notion. Informally, impact of a set of nodes quantifies the necessity of the nodes in the diffusion process. We prove that the impact is monotonic. Interestingly, unlike similar formulation of critical edges in the context of Linear Threshold diffusion model, impact is neither submodular nor supermodular. Furthermore, we prove that the problem of finding a set of nodes which maximizes impact is NP-Hard. Hence, we develop heuristics that rely on submodular approximations of the impact function. We empirically evaluate our heuristics by comparing the level of disruption achieved by identifying and removing critical nodes as opposed to that achieved by removing the most influential nodes. 
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  3. Atzmuller, Martin ; Coscia, Michele ; Missaoui, Rokia (Ed.)
    Influence diffusion has been central to the study of the propagation of information in social networks, where influence is typically modeled as a binary property of entities: influenced or not influenced. We introduce the notion of attitude, which, as described in social psychology, is the degree by which an entity is influenced by the information. We present an information diffusion model that quantifies the degree of influence, i.e., attitude of individuals, in a social network. With this model, we formulate and study the attitude maximization problem. We prove that the function for computing attitude is monotonic and sub-modular, and the attitude maximization problem is NP-Hard. We present a greedy algorithm for maximization with an approximation guarantee of $(1-1/e)$. Using the same model, we also introduce the notion of ``actionable'' attitude with the aim to study the scenarios where attaining individuals with high attitude is objectively more important than maximizing the attitude of the entire network. We show that the function for computing actionable attitude, unlike that for computing attitude, is non-submodular but is approximately submodular. We present an approximation algorithm for maximizing actionable attitude in a network. We experimentally evaluated our algorithms and studied empirical properties of the attitude of nodes in the network such as spatial and value distribution of high attitude nodes. 
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  4. null (Ed.)