Title: Using mathematics to help unlock social diffusion

Abstract: Social diffusion is a process that occurs whenever a novel idea, product, or behavior is introduced in a population and such behavior is collectively adopted, replacing an existing status quo. Unlocking such a process is key for the well functioning of our societies, e.g., to face health crises in a timely manner or speed up the transition towards a sustainable economy. In this talk, we illustrate how mathematical modeling and analysis can assist public authorities in such an important objective. First, we illustrate how we designed an experiment to gather evidence on the role of key behavioral factors (namely, social influence, inertia, and dynamic norms) during social diffusion. Then, we present a model grounded on such experimental observations, and we study it to gain analytical insights into the impact of such behavioral factors and evaluate the effectiveness of different realistic intervention policies to unlock social diffusion.

Speaker’s bio: Lorenzo Zino is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electronics and Telecommunications at Politecnico di Torino (Italy) since 2022. He received the BS and MS in Mathematical Engineering from Politecnico di Torino in 2012 and 2014, respectively, and the PhD in Pure and Applied Mathematics (with honors) from Politecnico di Torino and Università di Torino (joint doctorate program), in 2018. Before starting his current position, he was a Research Fellow at Politecnico di Torino (2018-19) and at the University of Groningen (2019-22). He held visiting positions at Lund University (Sweden, in 2015), at New York University Tandon School of Engineering (US, in 2017-18 and 2019) and at Curtin University (Australia, in 2023). His current research interests include modeling, analysis, and control of dynamics over complex networks, applied probability, network analysis, and game theory. He is the author of more than 60 papers published in journals and proceedings of international conferences. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Computational Science and member of the Conference Editorial Board of the IEEE Control System Society and of the European Control Association.