“On the generalization of the Generalized Friendship paradox”

Talk summary: The well-known ‘friendship paradox’ states that – on the average  – your friendshave more friends than you have. In plain/technical words, we can describe it as follows: ‘your degree centrality is lower – on the average – than the degree centrality ofyour one-hop neighbors’. This paradox has its roots in the structural heterogeneity of the underlying networks wherever it applies. Recently, this paradox was extended to citationand co-authorship networks to examine the validity of the so-called ‘Generalized Friendship paradox’ that considers quantities other than the degree of a node. However, due to the way modern research is conducted, i.e., a hierarchy of senior, less senior and junior researchers, that study did not contribute significantly new findings relevant to the original friendship paradox. In this talk, we will investigate in an empirical way whether the paradox holds for other centrality measures as well except from the degree centrality, and provide evidence of a ‘centrality paradox’; we will also investigate whether ‘your friends are more influential than you are’, and provide evidence of the ‘spreading paradox’ in which the nodes’ feature isprobabilistic (spreading ability) rather that deterministic (‘amount’ of centralization). Paradoxes will be examined both for 1-hop and more distant neighborhoods. Finally, we will conclude with applications of these paradoxes to network sampling for purposes of diffusion and blocking.

Speaker bio: Dimitrios Katsaros is assistant professor with the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Thessaly (Greece), and he is visiting YINS for the summer of 2017. He received his Ph.D. from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece) in 2004. His research interests lie in the area of distributed systems. More information can found at: http://www.e-ce.uth.gr/~dkatsar

He can be contacted at: d.katsaros at yale.edu or dkatsar at inf.uth.gr

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