Weiqi Chu: What is opinion dynamics?

The perspectives and opinions of people change and spread through social interactions on a daily basis. In the study of opinion dynamics on social networks, one often models social entities (such as Facebook accounts) as nodes and their relationships (such as Friendship) as edges, and examines how opinions evolve as dynamical processes on networks, including graphs, hypergraphs, multi-layer networks, etc. This talk will highlight some classical models of opinion dynamics and present insights from both modeling and inference perspectives on how these models are studied.