Mentor: Noelle West (UNT Graduate)

Title: Mathematically Modelling Virus Propagation on Social Media Networks with the SMIRQ Model

Abstract: As social networks grow on a global scale and become more complex, users become increasingly susceptible to digital attacks and risk their accounts being compromised. In the United States, it costs businesses billions of dollars annually to handle the damages of such digital attacks. Furthermore, individuals' personal devices and accounts are at risk, potentially costing them their privacy, personal files, and financial security. Hence, to find better methods of preventing these attacks, we developed the probabilistic SMIRQ (pSMIRQ) model, an extension of the standard SEIR model used in epidemiology. Notably, our model improves upon SEIR models for this class of problem by accounting for the connections between individuals in social media networks by generating a random scale-free network, via the Barabási-Albert (BA) Algorithm, while maintaining the analytical benefits of SEIR models.