After analyzing 120 million retweets connected to 12.5 million users and 1.3 million hashtags, we have recently published  in Scientific Reports the paper "Competition among memes in a world with limited attention". The paper, is a collaboration within the Truthy project, it's not so much the message intrinsic value but rather network structure and competition for attention that determine whether a meme becomes popular. The paper has been widely reported in the media. 

The Computational Approches to Social Modeling (ChASM) is a workshop organized by B. Gonçalves and N. Perra to bring together practitioners of both computer science and social science so that both may better understand the challenges faced by each other and how best they may collaborate to overcome them. 
The workshop is co-located with the International Conference on Computational Sciences (ICCS), Omaha, Nebraska, 4-6 June 2012. 
[Chasm: a profound difference between people, viewpoints, feelings, etc.]

Nature Physics has published an Insight issue about Complexity. The collection of articles surveys important progress in our fundamental understanding of what  seemingly disparate 'complex systems' have in common. Among the articles a review by Vespignani on Modelling dynamical processes in complex socio-technical systems. This article reviews the fundamental tools for modelling dynamical processes such as epidemic outbreaks and routing of information through computer networks  and discusses a number of applications.

Starting this fall the MoBS group has a new house and affiliation with Northeastern University in Boston, MA. The group is moving into a newly remodeled computational laboratory - the suite 132 - in the Nightingale Building on Forsyth Street. The laboratory has joint affiliations with the Department of Physics, the Department of Health Sciences and  the College of Computer and Information  Sciences. We thank the many friends and colleagues at Indiana University for the many years of exciting scientific work. We look forward to continuing collaborate with them in the future. At the same time we are excited to make new friends in the vibrant scientific community of Boston and to initiate new collaborations and research activities in our new academic home.