Epidemics, marketing and opinion setting - competitive and collaborative spreading processes

Epidemic spreading has existed as long as life itself. Alongside their impact on community health, spreading processes became a modelling tool for opinion-setting, information dissemination and marketing on social and information networks. Information, supporting ideas or products, is passed between network constituents in a probabilistic process akin to epidemic spreading, where competing news/advertisements compete on the largest audience. On the other hand, some processes exploit previous exposure to concepts/diseases to facilitate the effective spread of new information/diseases, e.g., the risk of developing tuberculosis is 16-27 times greater in HIV carriers. Optimising the use of limited resources for maximising spread, blocking hate/fake information or the containment of infectious diseases is of great societal relevance. We will analyse interacting spreading processes and develop principled algorithms for resource optimisation. We will apply the methodology to applications that are of interest to our industrial collaborator-BT, including containment, mitigation and source identification of malware infections.
Collaborator: BT

Further information: https://jobs.aston.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?ref=R190202