Séminaire P. Frasca (CNRS, GIPSA-lab): "The harmonic influence in social networks and its distributed computation by message passing"

Title: The harmonic influence in social networks and its distributed computation by message passing.

Speaker: Paolo Frasca (CNRS, Gipsa-lab, Grenoble)

Abstract: An important issue in the study of dynamical processes on networks is the identification of the most influential nodes, i.e. those with the higher ability to drive the others towards a desired state. The harmonic influence is a measure that quantifies the ability of a leader node to alter the average opinion of a social influence network with linear interactions, acting against an adversary field node. Its computation is equivalent to solve a discrete Dirichlet problem associated to a grounded Laplacian for every node. The harmonic influence can be approximated by a distributed message-passing algorithm, inspired by an analogy between electrical and social networks on tree graphs. The algorithm is guaranteed to convergence on any connected graph with symmetric Laplacian. Our simulations show that when the network has a larger number of cycles, the algorithm becomes slower and less accurate, but nevertheless provides a useful approximation. 

Bio: Paolo Frasca received the Ph.D. degree in Mathematics for Engineering Sciences from Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy, in 2009. Between 2008 and 2013, he has held research and visiting positions at the University of California, Santa Barbara (USA), at the IAC-CNR (Rome, Italy), at the University of Salerno (Italy), and at the Politecnico di Torino. From 2013 to 2016, he has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands. Since October 2016 he is CNRS Researcher with GIPSA-lab, Grenoble, France. 
His research interests are in the theory of network systems and cyber-physical systems, with applications to robotic, sensor, infrastructural, and social networks. He is a recipient of the 2013 SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization Best Paper Prize. He has been a Visiting Professor at the LAAS, Toulouse, France, in 2016 and at the University of Cagliari, Italy, in 2017. 
Dr. Frasca has served in the Conference Editorial Boards of several international conferences, including IEEE CDC, ACC, ECC, MTNS, IEEE CASE, IFAC NecSys, and is currently serving as Associate Editor for the International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control, the Asian Journal of Control, and the IEEE Control Systems Letters.