This Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Science Research (IBSS) project will study human dynamics across social media and social networks and focus on the modeling of information diffusion over both time and space, and the connection between online activities and real world human behaviors. The research team will study diffusion patterns of human messages, activities, and communications by using both computational methods (e.g., social network analysis, geographic information systems, and machine-learning) and traditional social scientific approaches (e.g., qualitative analysis, inferential statistics, and behavior analysis). New communication theories, new knowledge discovery tools, and new computational models will be developed and validated by the interdisciplinary research team.

This project will enable the convergence of spatial science, social media, communication, computer science, and social behavioral analysis, and facilitate the transformation of behavioral and social science research to computational applications and modeling (simulation, prediction, and analytics) using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Two scenarios (public response to disaster warnings/alerts, and political and electoral referenda of controversial social topics at state or national level) will be used to validate and improve a new communication theory regarding memes, or reproducible messages.