Boleslaw K. Szymanski

Prof. Dr. Boleslaw K. Szymanski

1. Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, NY 12180-3590, USA
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orcid

Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

43Years (1984-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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30 August 2013 in ACM Computing Surveys
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
JXJierui Xie
Jierui Xie
SKStephen Kelley
Stephen Kelley
BSBoleslaw K. Szymanski
Boleslaw K. Szymanski
This article reviews the state-of-the-art in overlapping community detection algorithms, quality measures, and benchmarks. A thorough comparison of different algorithms (a total of fourteen) is provided. In addition to community-level evaluation, we propose a framework for evaluating algorithms' ability to detect overlapping nodes, which helps to assess overdetection and underdetection. After considering community-level detection performance measured by normalized mutual information, the Omega index, and node-level detection performance measured by F-score, we reached the following conclusions. For low overlapping density networks, SLPA, OSLOM, Game, and COPRA offer better performance than the other tested algorithms. For networks with high overlapping density and high overlapping diversity, both SLPA and Game provide relatively stable performance. However, test results also suggest that the detection in such networks is still not yet fully resolved. A common feature observed by various algorithms in real-world networks is the relatively small fraction of overlapping nodes (typically less than 30%), each of which belongs to only 2 or 3 communities.

22 July 2011 in Physical Review E
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Journal Article
Closed access
PDF file
JXJ. Xie
J. Xie
SSS. Sreenivasan
S. Sreenivasan
GKG. Korniss
G. Korniss
WZW. Zhang
W. Zhang
CLC. Lim
C. Lim
BSBoleslaw K. Szymanski
Boleslaw K. Szymanski
We show how the prevailing majority opinion in a population can be rapidly reversed by a small fraction p of randomly distributed committed agents who consistently proselytize the opposing opinion and are immune to influence. Specifically, we show that when the committed fraction grows beyond a critical value pc≈10%, there is a dramatic decrease in the time Tc taken for the entire population to adopt the committed opinion. In particular, for complete graphs we show that when p<pc, Tc~exp[α(p)N], whereas for p>pc, Tc~lnN. We conclude with simulation results for Erdős-Rényi random graphs and scale-free networks which show qualitatively similar behavior.

1 December 2011
Verified
Conference Paper
Closed access
JXJierui Xie
Jierui Xie
BSBoleslaw K. Szymanski
Boleslaw K. Szymanski
XLXiaoming Liu
Xiaoming Liu
Overlap is one of the characteristics of social networks, in which a person may belong to more than one social group. For this reason, discovering overlapping structures is necessary for realistic social analysis. In this paper, we present a novel, general framework to detect and analyze both individual overlapping nodes and entire communities. In this framework, nodes exchange labels according to dynamic interaction rules. A specific implementation called Speaker-listener Label Propagation Algorithm (SLPA) demonstrates an excellent performance in identifying both overlapping nodes and overlapping communities with different degrees of diversity.

18 January 2012 in Knowledge and Information Systems
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Journal Article
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JBJoel W. Branch
Joel W. Branch
CGChris Giannella
Chris Giannella
BSBoleslaw K. Szymanski
Boleslaw K. Szymanski
RWRan Wolff
Ran Wolff
HKHillol Kargupta
Hillol Kargupta

16 December 2019 in Applied Network Science
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Journal Article
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HCHocine Cherifi
Hocine Cherifi
GPGergely Palla
Gergely Palla
BSBoleslaw K. Szymanski
Boleslaw K. Szymanski
XLXiaoyan Lu
Xiaoyan Lu
Community structure is one of the most relevant features encountered in numerous real-world applications of networked systems. Despite the tremendous effort of a large interdisciplinary community of scientists working on this subject over the past few decades to characterize, model, and analyze communities, more investigations are needed in order to better understand the impact of community structure and its dynamics on networked systems. Here, we first focus on generative models of communities in complex networks and their role in developing strong foundation for community detection algorithms. We discuss modularity and the use of modularity maximization as the basis for community detection. Then, we follow with an overview of the Stochastic Block Model and its different variants as well as inference of community structures from such models. Next, we focus on time evolving networks, where existing nodes and links can disappear, and in parallel new nodes and links may be introduced. The extraction of communities under such circumstances poses an interesting and non-trivial problem that has gained considerable interest over the last decade. We briefly discuss considerable advances made in this field recently. Finally, we focus on immunization strategies essential for targeting the influential spreaders of epidemics in modular networks. Their main goal is to select and immunize a small proportion of individuals from the whole network to control the diffusion process. Various strategies have emerged over the years suggesting different ways to immunize nodes in networks with overlapping and non-overlapping community structure. We first discuss stochastic strategies that require little or no information about the network topology at the expense of their performance. Then, we introduce deterministic strategies that have proven to be very efficient in controlling the epidemic outbreaks, but require complete knowledge of the network.

1 January 2012
Verified
Book Chapter
Closed access
PDF file
JXJierui Xie
Jierui Xie
BSBoleslaw K. Szymanski
Boleslaw K. Szymanski