Speaker: Madhu Dhiman, IIT Bombay
Title: Integrative Modeling and Analysis of the Interplay Between Epidemic and News Propagation Processes
Date and Time: 15 October 2024, at 2 p.m., Lagrange Gris (L101), Inria, Sophia Antipolis
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has witnessed the role of online social networks (OSNs) in the spread of infectious diseases. The rise in severity of the epidemic augments the need for proper guidelines, but also promotes the propagation of fake news-items. The popularity of a news-item can reshape public health behaviours and affect the epidemic processes. There is a clear inter-dependency between the epidemic process and the spreading of news-items.
This work creates an integrative framework to understand the interplay. We first develop a population-dependent ‘saturated branching process’ to continually track the propagation of trending news-items on OSNs. A two-time scale dynamical system is obtained by integrating the news-propagation model with the SIRS epidemic model, to analyze the holistic system. It is observed that a pattern of periodic infections emerges under a linear behavioural influence, which explains the waves of infection and reinfection that we have experienced during the pandemic. We use numerical experiments to corroborate the results and use Twitter and COVID-19 data-sets to recreate the historical infection curve using the integrative model.
Biography: Madhu Dhiman is currently in NEO team for a PhD internship. Madhu is the PhD student of Prof. Veeraruna Kavitha Voleti from IIT Bombay.
