An outbreak of facebook viruses: simulating the spread of biological viruses
Two days ago, I received a link to a strange video from my facebook friend. I later realized it was part of an outbreak of viruses, from friends to friends, throughout the social network. Once clicking the video, one’s Facebook password and account information could be stolen, which could be used to spread more viruses by sending those unintended strange videos to other friends on facebook. Seeing how the same particular video was spread out to 11 of my friends within 24 hours, I was wondering if we could apply such an outbreak in the network system to an outbreak of biological viruses in our society.
Facebook is a ubiquitous social network that interconnects over 750 million active users. Recently, Dr. Gal Almogy and Professor Nir Ben-Tal at Tel Aviv University have developed a Facebook application called PiggyDemic that could simulate a virus outbreak throughout the network. PiggyDemic determines who are “susceptible”, “immune”, or “infected”. Infected facebook users spread out the virus through their interactions with other friends. The application’s main goal is to model biological viruses – how they spread and mutate over human interactions. Dr. Almogy thinks this model is more effective at collecting and analyzing data than mathematical algorithms that do not consider an unequal distribution of viruses across population (e.g some viruses are concentrated in one region than the other, such as HIV in Africa).
I always thought we could only analyze the outbreak of viruses by observing people who are actually infected and are spreading viruses to their neighbors. Then I realized how we could apply some basic network concepts to explain such a phenomenon. If I consider humans as nodes, then there are many paths connecting my friends and me. Among many nodes, those that have strong ties with me (I say those with whom I interact daily) probably have a more chance of getting infected than those that have weak ties with me. I cannot say much about biological processes behind the outbreak of viruses, but I think viruses are spreading out relatively faster/more between those nodes that have strong ties. If we are considering some people as being “immune” or “susceptible” we could get a more complicated network as a following diagram that I drew:
I’m certain that biological viruses spread more complicated than the above figure. As a curious undergraduate student, I hope that PiggyDemic greatly helps simulating actual outbreak of viruses, so that we could better predict the pattern of infection and protect humans from infecting each other.
SOURCE:
American Friends of Tel Aviv University (2011, August 30). Watching viruses ‘friend’ a network: Researchers develop Facebook application to track the path of infection. ScienceDaily. Retrieved September 14, 2011, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2011/08/110830082259.htm