Invited Speaker Prof. Dr. Markus Strohmaier is chair for Methods and Theories of Computational Social Sciences and Humanities at RWTH Aachen University and Scientific Coordinator for Digital Behavioral Data at GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Cologne.

At our conference, he will give a talk about Modeling of Minorities in Social Network. Homophily can put minority groups in social networks at a disadvantage by restricting their ability to establish links with people from a majority group. This can limit the overall visibility of minorities in the network, and create biases. In this talk, Markus Strohmaier will show how the visibility of minority groups in social networks is a function of (i) their relative group size and (ii) the presence or absence of homophilic behavior. In addition, the results show that perception biases can emerge in social networks with high homophily or high heterophily and unequal group sizes, and that these effects are highly related to the asymmetric nature of homophily in networks. This work presents a foundation for assessing the visibility of minority groups and corresponding perception biases in social networks in which homophilic or heterophilic behaviour is present.

If you are interested in the talk, join the "Network Mechanisms"-session which he will open on Thursday, September 26 at 09:00 in room A703.