Abstract of the seminar:

    The capacity to collect fingerprints of individuals in online media has revolutionized the way researchers explore human society. Social systems can be seen as a non-linear superposition of a multitude of complex social networks, where nodes represent individuals and links capture a variety of different social relations. Here we focus on two unexplored aspects of large-scale social networks:

    - For the first time, we analyze a complete, multi-relational, large social network of a society consisting of the 300,000 odd players of a massive multiplayer online game, between which we identify six different types of one-to-one interactions. Amongst others, we present the first empirical large-scale verification of the long-standing structural balance theory, by focusing on the specific multiplex network of friendship and enmity relations.

    - We focus on the psychological profile of large-scale populations. To do so, we have analyzed data from a highly-popular Facebook application that is able to survey a very large number of Facebook users with peer-reviewed personality tests. Based on test results, we study the relationship between network importance (number of Facebook contacts) and personality traits, the first of its kind on a large number of subjects (400,000).

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