Seminar at TU Delft: How Complex Contagion Influences Consensus in Collective Decision-Making
On 27 October 2026, Roland Bouffanais gave an invited seminar at the Department of Quantum & Computer Engineering of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS) at Delft University of Technology, titled “How complex contagion influences consensus in collective decision-making”.
The visit was made possible by Roland’s current fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) of the University of Amsterdam (UvA), which he is taking advantage of to reconnect with collaborators across the Netherlands.
The talk revisited a question at the heart of the group’s research on collective behavior: how the way influence spreads through a group (by simple contagion, where a single exposure suffices, or by complex contagion, where reinforcement from several peers is needed) shapes the group’s ability to reach consensus, and how this interplays with the topology of the underlying interaction network. It drew on our Nature Communications paper on the transition from simple to complex contagion in collective decision-making and on our recent Scientific Reports article on consensus formation on scale-free networks, both co-authored with Rob Kooij. It was a great pleasure to have colleagues from a range of disciplines (applied mathematics, network science and computer science) in the audience, and the discussion that followed reflected that breadth.
A special mention goes to Prof. Rob Kooij, a long-time colleague and collaborator, who kindly extended the invitation and hosted the visit. It was a pleasure to meet Robert Adamovski, Prof. Huijuan Wang, Prof. Johan Dubbeldam, Prof. Piet Van Mieghem and Prof. Caterina De Bacco, and a real pleasure to become reacquainted with Prof. Riccardo Taormina, a former collaborator from the iTrust days at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. What a small world!
Joint publications with Rob Kooij
- Social Contagion Drives Collective Consensus Formation on Scale-Free Networks
Savari M, Horsevad N, Kooij RE, Chamanbaz M, Wernli D & Bouffanais R
Scientific Reports (16), 2026. [pdf] [doi] - Controllability of a Class of Swarm Signaling Networks
Sun P, Kooij RE & Bouffanais R
J. Complex Networks (10):6, cnac054, 2022. [pdf] [doi] - Transition from Simple to Complex Contagion in Collective Decision-Making
Horsevad N, Mateo D, Kooij RE, Barrat A & Bouffanais R
Nature Communications (13), 1442, 2022. [pdf] [doi] - Tuning the Clustering Coefficient of Generalized Circulant Networks
Kooij RE, Horsevad N & Bouffanais R
Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications (578), 126088, 2021. [pdf] [doi]
