[#45] Assessing the Impact of Group Interactions on Climate-related Opinion Change in Reddit & From Padawan to Jedi Master: Transitioning from PhD to Independent Researcher in Academia
Understanding how opinions spread in social media is essential for unraveling offline and real-world behaviors, especially for predicting phenomena like collective actions. While existing models of opinion diffusion attempt to reflect the complexity of social interactions, the lack of ground-truth data has limited our ability to assess their performance effectively.
In this talk, I will discuss our work on the topic by providing empirical evidence for the significance of group interactions in online discussions and their role in opinion formation. Specifically, I will introduce a temporal hypergraph-based model to capture the structure of conversational threads, enabling the representation of complex group dynamics. By comparing this high-order model against traditional graph-based approaches, results show that incorporating group social dynamics may lead to more accurate predictions of opinion evolution. However, while our findings mark progress in modeling these complex social systems, significant challenges remain in fully capturing the nuances of how opinions form and evolve in online spaces.
‘PhD students are the puppies of academia. Everyone loves puppies and protects them’, my supervisor used to tell me. Only lately have I truly understood his meaning. Doctoral students (and postdoc researchers) enjoy a uniquely sheltered position in academia, where mentorship and support are readily available. However, the shift to senior academic positions marks a dramatic change, thrusting researchers into a competitive environment where independent survival and success become the only goal to achieve.
Hey Netfollower, if you’re in that gray area of transitioning from your PhD to becoming an independent researcher, the last seminar was for you! Alessia Antelmi from the University of Turin talked about that transition on February 20th.
Alessia’s research focuses on a temporal hypergraph model to assess the impact of group interactions on climate-related opinion change in Reddit. Compared to traditional graph-based approaches, it shows how incorporating group dynamics improves predictions of opinion evolution.
In the discussion, Alessia compared the academic path to a puppy growing up. As a PhD student, you receive a lot of attention and spend most of your time doing research. However, as you transition to a job with more responsibilities, your research time decreases, and that’s probably what you’ll miss the most.
As you become a postdoc and then a senior researcher, you’ll be responsible for others, and it’s up to you what kind of mentor you want to be. It’s your turn now to be supportive, understand others’ positions, and help another “puppy” grow up.
