Month: October 2022

Background Discord, formerly a free web-based real-time chat room software designed for the video game community, is now evolving into a messenger and social platform combined. Now, it is not just for gamers but provides a new interactive social channel for strangers with the same interests. Now Discord, which was only born in 2015, now […]

Gamifying Network Reliability: Hunting the Nash Equilibrium The construction of a transport network that keeps the optimization of performance and connectivity reliability at a high standard is a difficult process. Engineers and planners involved in network design are constantly tackling the issue and innovating new possible solutions to expedite the process. A new hypothetical for […]

Introduction Recalling from Week 3 material about Triadic Closure, we know that if one node (say node A) has strong ties to both of the other two nodes (say node B and C), then there must be an edge between the other two nodes. Here, the edge between B and C can be strong tie […]

Introduction Steam is a video game digital distribution service that boasts the highest market share among gaming platforms. In other words, Steam would often be a gamer’s first choice. Now, what does the network in this 120 million-user platform looks like? How do different game genres affect the network’s shape? Data Analysis on Steam Games […]

What is ZTS? As technology evolves with software and data moving to the cloud, there’s been a massive uptick in cyber attacks and data breaches that have occurred in 2022 alone. The hottest and most recent attack was from the Lapsus Hacking Group who took down a plethora of Uber’s internal tooling, and before that, […]

Introduction The success of competitive sports teams are often heavily dependant on teamwork and strong leadership. The second-in-command, team captain, is often an extension of the coach on the floor and plays a vital role on the team. With responsibilities that often go beyond the actual sport, the team captain must ensue a sense of […]

Canada’s power grid could have the potential to improve significantly, which would lead to benefits such as additional employment opportunities as well as decreasing carbon emission rates. In order to do so, Canada will need to work closely with the USA to construct an improved power grid. However, Canadian provinces are focusing on provincial utilities. […]

Introduction With the development of the world’s economies, the population moving to central cities increasing during past decades, which imposes significant pressure on urban traffic. The underground railway, an important role in diverting ground traffic was rapidly established. However, disruption, signal failures, and station cut-offs frequently impact the underground network service and cause trouble for […]

Introduction Social media platforms have become major focal points to the spread of information. With the incredible expansion of online social networks, they have become highly integrated to our everyday lives. Thus, these platforms have become effective channels for major news sources for many of these users. There have been countless times of news being […]

Introduction Human displacement is the relocation of an individual usually driven by unwanted circumstances such as climate change, conflict, and human rights violations. Doing this is a deeply distressing task as they may be leaving friends, loved ones, and the comfort of familiarity involuntarily. In 2014, United Nation Refugee Agency showed that 59.5 million individuals […]

Introduction Earlier this year at July, the photographer Tati Bruening , who has more than 300k followers on instagram, created a petition condemning the recent change regarding recommendation algorithm on instagram. This post has been shared by numerous influencers with billions of followers on instagram. And they all get the same feeling about instagram gradually […]

An Exploration of Graph Clustering Algorithms Introduction: Ever since the topic of graph clustering has been brought up in class, I have been deeply intrigued by the concept. My mind was swimming with ideas for other possible clustering algorithms and how to measure the quality of a clustering algorithm. Then clustering was mentioned in another […]

Introduction Though it is inevitable for individuals to hold a wide variety of beliefs, in recent years, many have become concerned about the growing prevalence of various potentially harmful beliefs. such as anti-vaccination and other such beliefs that oppose findings from mainstream science. As a result, attempts have been made to educate people on these […]

Introduction Game theory is a relatively new branch of mathematics that deals with strategic competitive situations where results are based on both the main participants and the other participants (competitors) actions. It’s application to multiplayer decision based games, like Overwatch, has been very interesting to many, including me. Multiple overwatch statisticians have taken to the […]

Introduction As the leaves change colour and the weather cools, I like to think back and remember that just a few months ago it was summer. As someone who picked up gardening as a hobby during the pandemic, summer is a time for life and growth. I found it fascinating that from a tiny little […]

Introduction: The unprecedented outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020 changed everyone’s life. Public facilities were shut down, such as schools, restaurants and companies. A lot of people were forced to work/study from home, some of them even lost their jobs. This all seemed chaotic and desperate at first glance. However, this is not the first pandemic […]

Introduction There are, of course, various blessings and curses associated with the current “Age of Information.” The internet makes information retrieval seem a rather primitive task, but it is certainly no longer as easy as it was decades ago to contribute meaningfully to the network of information as it has grown to a gargantuan size. […]

Stellaris is a sci-fi grand strategy game set 200 years into the future. In the game, players can control one empire in the milky way galaxy that has just acquired the technology to travel to other star systems. In this game, players can experience first contact with other alien species, wage wars with other empires, […]

Introduction As gaming continues to grow in popularity, more of our time is spent playing, purchasing/downloading, and discussing games and gaming topics whether you’re a casual gamer or a hard-core achievement hunter. This large demographic of people, roughly making up 60% of Americans (O’Neill et al. 2016). So being able to measure their behavior on […]

Introduction Bitcoin is a digital currency which uses a decentralized ledger called blockchain to keep track of all the transactions. Instead of having a centralized authority (a centralized ledger) like bank to store transactions, the bitcoin is structured in peer-to-peer network where every peer is a node in the network. Due to the decentralized nature […]

Introduction Despite their name, weak ties possess an inherent strength that creates many opportunities in a network, whether it is positive (good) or negative (bad). The strength of weak ties concept is demonstrated effectively in the transmission of illnesses (negative) in social networks such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. A key point of interest for […]

Introduction The game of chess as a whole has been studied for centuries before the introduction of computer chess engines. Ever since computer chess engines have proven to become stronger than even the top human chess players in the 1996 Deep Blue v. Kasparov match, there have been incremental discoveries and shifts in the best […]

Introduction Everyone is aware of how famous NBA players are in today’s world, they are athletes but hold the same value of celebrities. I have been a fan of basketball ever since I knew what it was, to learning it, to playing it, and to watching it, I can’t get enough of it. We all […]

Introduction In class, we learned about homophily, which is the tendency for individuals showing the same characteristic to form connections amongst one another. I thought this was interesting and wanted to take a further look at it. I came across this interesting paper on depressive symptom homophily amongst older adults and I felt that this […]

[The images are small. Blurry if sized up so refer to this for a clear image] Introduction We, as humans, are innately social species. Our connections and social interactions contribute to our happiness. The friendship paradox was introduced in class as a phenomenon where on average, your friends probably have more friends than you do. Intuitively, […]

Introduction As a huge fan of basketball I was curious to see if if the concepts taught in CSCC46 could be applied to a network analysis of the NBA. Turns out a student at UCLA named Biancheng Wang wrote a thesis analyzing social networks in the NBA. In this paper they analyze the network of […]

Introduction I’ve always been a big sports fan. One of the things that always interested me, and many similar to me are the various rivalries that exist between sports teams. These competitions between teams create excitement, suspense, and really gets the fans involved with the players on the team. For example, I personally used to […]

Introduction Sina Weibo is one of the most popular blogging services in China. The total user number of Sina Weibo now reaches 582 million this year. Factors affecting user activities have received significant attention from the research communities. Why is this important? Learning how user activities are affected could help the application provide more precise […]

Introduction: Sports are increasing in popularity with many sports teams with millions of fans across the world. Every fan wants to see their team succeed and win championships. In order for sport teams to improve and have chemistry coaches hold practices with drills so that the team can improve as a unit. This article goes […]