Geo-Social Complexity

In the previous study on Covid-19 vaccine debates , we have revealed the complex communication patterns in hybrid spaces. A following up question that intrigues us is when people are exposed to such complicated conversational context hybrid spaces, with contradictory opinions, how do they make decisions about Covid-19 vaccine uptake.  To answer these questions,  with Andrew Crooks , and Li Yin , we have published a new article  " How information propagation in hybrid spaces affects decision-making: using ABM to simulate Covid-19 vaccine uptake " in the  International Journal of Geographical Information Science .  This research is the first one that has combined the Space-place (Splatial) framework with the social influence network theory and applied to them model Covid-19 vaccine uptake at individual level.  Our model captures the temporal dynamics of vaccination progress with small errors (MAE = 2.45). Our results suggest that all hybrid spaces are indispe...

During the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, lockdown and social distancing policies have greatly limited human activities in the physical space, and people relied on social media to stay connected while being physically apart. With  Andrew Crooks and Li Yin , we studied how social media affects information propagation from physical to relational and cyber spaces.    Abstract: With the advent of social media, human dynamics studied in purely physical space have been extended to that of  a cyber and relational context. However, connections and interactions between these hybrid spaces have not  been sufficiently investigated. The “ space-place (Splatial) ” framework proposed in recent years allows capturing  human activities in the hybrid of spaces. This study applies the Splatial framework to examine the information  propagation between cyber, relational, and physical spaces through a case study of Covid-19 vaccine debates in  New York State (NYS). Whereby...