On May 14, 2024, the School of Media and Communication at Shenzhen University hosted an engaging lecture titled “Influence Diffusion in Social Network”, part of the Deep Dive Digital Communication lecture series. Professor Wei Chen, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, and the Chair of MSR Asia Theory Center, who also holds part-time professorships at prestigious institutions including Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Shenzhen) was invited as the keynote speaker. He is also an IEEE Fellow and Executive Committee Member of the CCF. Professor Chen has pioneered influential studies on topics ranging from social network modeling and influence maximization to combinatorial online learning and distributed computing. His work has repeatedly been honored with conference awards, including Best Paper and Most Influential Paper of the Decade. His publications, cited over 17,000 times, have earned recognition from both Elsevier and Stanford University.

The lecture delved into two main themes. The first part introduced several landmark studies on influence diffusion, illustrating how social networks shape and extend influence from both sociological and big data analytics perspectives. The second part transited to a computer science viewpoint, focusing on modeling network-based communication and optimizing influence diffusion within networks. The interdisciplinary nature of influence diffusion studies merges principles from sociology, communication, and complex network analysis with computational techniques, offering a comprehensive view of this rapidly evolving field.