Background In 2014, the world was startled by a sudden outbreak of Ebola. Although Ebola
infections and deaths occurred almost exclusively in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, few …

Online social networking services entice millions of users to spend hours every day
interacting with each other. The focus of this work is to explain the effect that geographic …

Gender homophily, or the preference for interaction with individuals of the same gender, has
been observed in many contexts, especially during childhood and adolescence. In this study …

Socially aware services often have a large user base and data of users have to be
partitioned and replicated over multiple geographically distributed clouds. Choosing in …

One of the basic assumptions of spatial theory is formulated in Waldo Tobler's first law of
geography:" everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than …

Social media and social networks have already woven themselves into the very fabric of
everyday life. This results in a dramatic increase of social data capturing various relations …

The use of social network sites helps people to make and maintain social ties accumulating
social capital, which is increasingly important for individual success. There is a wide …

With the advent of Information and Communication technology (ICT) in modern age, the
statement of “death of distance” has received numerous discussions. This article contributes …

Studies on friendships in online social networks involving geographic distance have so far
relied on the city location provided in users' profiles. Consequently, most of the research on …

Abstract Applications of the Social Web are ubiquitous and have become an integral part of
everyday life: Users make friends, for example, with the help of online social networks, share …