Modul:   MAT975  Research Seminar in Network Science

Improving the visibility of minorities through network growth interventions

Talk by Leonie Neuhäuser

Speaker invited by: Prof. Dr. Alexandre Bovet

Date: 20.06.23  Time: 14.00 - 15.00  Room: Y27H12

Networks provide a powerful framework for analysing complex systems in a variety of domains, including social, technological and biological systems. In their simplest form, networks represent the components of a system as unlabelled nodes and the interactions between them as pairwise edges. While this abstraction is both simple and expressive, it may fail to capture important aspects of the system, in particular the concept of groups. Groups can appear in a system in different ways, for example at the macroscopic level in the form of group membership of nodes, or at the microscopic level in the form of group interactions between nodes. In this talk, I will discuss why it is necessary to model the effect of groups on network structure and dynamics in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of a system of interest. As one particular example, I will focus on how modelling group membership enables the study of inequality and marginalisation from a network analysis perspective. Improving the position of minority groups in networks is a challenge of theoretical and social importance. However, it is unclear which interventions are effective in achieving this goal. I present a model that explores different types of network growth interventions and find that even extreme quotas are not sufficient to increase minority representation in rankings unless they are coupled with the right type of behavioural intervention.