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Jonathan Wright - 'Social Media and the Arab Uprisings: An Agenda for Research that Goes Beyond Anecdotal Evidence' - Part 2

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 00:02:55 GMT

Jonathan Wright - "Social Media, Mass Movements and the Arab Uprisings: An Agenda for Research that Goes Beyond Anecdotal Evidence" - Part 2
The Arab uprisings of the last year probably mark the most significant shocks to the geostrategic status quo since the transformation of Eastern Europe two decades ago. They are also the first such mass movements to take place in the age of widespread social media, transnational broadcasting and mobile phones. Beyond the hype about Twitter revolutions, how can we go about discovering the role social media really did play in the uprisings, and might the electronic paper trail the uprisings left in their wake throw light on the old question of why individuals decide to join a rebellion?

Biographical Note
Jonathan Wright studied Arabic and Turkish at Oxford University and worked for Reuters, the international news agency, for 30 years, mostly in the Middle East. For two years until late 2011 he was managing editor of Arab Media and Society, an on-line academic journal run by the American University in Cairo, specializing in research into the social effects and political uses of traditional and new media in the Arab world. He reported on the Egyptian uprising of January/February 201 and on the recent parliamentary elections. He also does literary translation of contemporary Arabic fiction and political writings.

Jonathan Wright - 'Social Media and the Arab Uprisings: An Agenda for Research that Goes Beyond Anecdotal Evidence' - Part 1

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 00:02:46 GMT

Jonathan Wright - "Social Media, Mass Movements and the Arab Uprisings: An Agenda for Research that Goes Beyond Anecdotal Evidence" - Part 1
The Arab uprisings of the last year probably mark the most significant shocks to the geostrategic status quo since the transformation of Eastern Europe two decades ago. They are also the first such mass movements to take place in the age of widespread social media, transnational broadcasting and mobile phones. Beyond the hype about Twitter revolutions, how can we go about discovering the role social media really did play in the uprisings, and might the electronic paper trail the uprisings left in their wake throw light on the old question of why individuals decide to join a rebellion?

Biographical Note
Jonathan Wright studied Arabic and Turkish at Oxford University and worked for Reuters, the international news agency, for 30 years, mostly in the Middle East. For two years until late 2011 he was managing editor of Arab Media and Society, an on-line academic journal run by the American University in Cairo, specializing in research into the social effects and political uses of traditional and new media in the Arab world. He reported on the Egyptian uprising of January/February 201 and on the recent parliamentary elections. He also does literary translation of contemporary Arabic fiction and political writings.

Videos of the ASSYST Scientific Meeting on Social Networks and Social Media 2012

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The videos from the ASSYST Scientific Meeting on Social Networks and Social Media, that was held in Cambridge, on the 18th and 19th of January 2012, and organised by Yasmin Merali and Pietro Lio, are available at the ASSYST/CSS Digital Library.

Yasmin Meraly - 'Final remarks'

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 01:03:00 GMT

Yasmin Meraly - "Final remarks"

Philip Seib - "Real-time diplomacy: politics and power in the social media era"

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 01:01:05 GMT

Philip Seib - "Real-Time Diplomacy: Politics and Power in the Social Media Era"
This talk is based partly on events of the Arab Awakening and ways that social media and social networks affected the conduct of diplomacy. When considering the ramifications of the tumult in the Middle East, a question arises: How can policymakers keep up with the vast amount of information coming from a vast number of sources?
The public’s expectations are geared to the speed of the information flow, but that does not necessarily mean that those who govern should try to match their policy implementation to the pace of this flow. Fast policymaking is often unwise policymaking, but that is an inadequate answer to those who are accustomed to getting their news with the click of a mouse and expect to see crises resolved by the next time they click. This talk does not endorse trying to match the pace of diplomacy to the speed of social and other media, but it does suggest that policymakers must do a better job of addressing the political realities and technological capabilities of a social-media-oriented society that relies heavily on networks of various kinds to acquire the information used in decision making and political action.
Although no precise how-to-do-it formula emerges from considering these matters, this talk may help establish the context in which policymakers and the public will be considering and responding to political events for years to come. The Arab Awakening of 2011 is just a starting point, and a long path lies ahead.

Biographical Note
Philip Seib is Professor of Journalism and Public Diplomacy and Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California, and is director of USC’s Center on Public Diplomacy. He is author or editor of numerous books, including Headline Diplomacy: How News Coverage Affects Foreign Policy; The Global Journalist: News and Conscience in a World of Conflict; Beyond the Front Lines: How the News Media Cover a World Shaped by War; Broadcasts from the Blitz: How Edward R. Murrow Helped Lead America into War; New Media and the New Middle East; The Al Jazeera Effect: How the New Global Media Are Reshaping World Politics; Global Terrorism and New Media: The Post-Al Qaeda Generation; Al Jazeera English: Global News in a Changing World; and the forthcoming Real-time Diplomacy: Politics and Power in the Social Media Era. He is editor of the Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political Communication, co-editor of the Palgrave Macmillan Series in Global Public Diplomacy, and co-editor of the journal Media, War, and Conflict.

Jonathan Nelson - 'Optimal and heuristic models of human information acquisition'

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:56:56 GMT

Jonathan Nelson - "Optimal and heuristic models of human information acquisition"
First, I will overview the three primary research themes at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, at the Max Planck Institute:
1. what decision strategies do people use;
2. in what environments are those strategies adaptive; and
3. how can environments be modified to facilitate adaptive behavior?
The rest of the talk will focus on one particular heuristic strategy for information acquisition. This strategy, the feature-difference heuristic, is mathematically equivalent to impact, a reasonable statistical model. People's information-acquisition goals, however, more frequently correspond to probability gain (error reduction). Depending on the properties of the environment, the feature-difference heuristic can approximate probability gain. In situations (such as medical diagnosis) in which different kinds of mistakes can have very different costs, the relationship between prior probabilities (e.g. of disease versus health) and the level of asymmetry in the costs may predict the relative adaptiveness of the feature difference heuristic.
Collaborators in this work: Gary Cottrell, Gerd Gigerenzer, Craig McKenzie, Bjoern Meder, Terry Sejnowski

Biographical Note
Jonathan Nelson's research focuses on optimal experimental design statistical models of information acquisition, and the circumstances under which particular heuristic models of information acquisition are optimal. He studies learning and decision making in children and adults. He is also interested in public policy issues, such as ways to improve incentive structures in health care. He completed a PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, and postdoctoral studies in computational neuroscience and computer science at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He is currently a research scientist in the Adaptive Behavior and Cognition Group, at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.

Cecilia Mascolo - 'A Study of Online Geo-Social Networks: Metrics and Applications'

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:48:26 GMT

Cecilia Mascolo - "A study of Online Geo-Social Networks: Metrics and Applications"
The use of online social network tools from mobile phones has recently opened the door to very fine grained research on human behaviour and use of space. Mobile phones are equipped with GPS which gives users the ability to signal their position with high accuracy. Online social networks allow the users to indicate whom they are friend with and whom they interact with. As a result, data sets collected from these geo-social network tools are very rich, offering geographical, temporal and social dimensions of users.
In this talk I will show results from our study on location based social networks on how geography shapes social ties and how the findings can be used to build better applications and systems for example for recommendation. I will also describe our study and new models of human mobility and use of space derived from this data.

Biographical Note
Dr. Cecilia Mascolo is a Reader in Mobile Systems in the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK. Cecilia’s research concentrates on mobility data gathering, analysis, modeling and exploitation. She has published extensively in the areas of mobile and sensor networks, mobile network routing, realistic mobility models and social network analysis. In particular, recently she has worked on a social based model for mobility, on complex network extensions which include time and then space. Cecilia has served as in the Organization Committees of many mobile and sensor systems, middleware and data mining conferences and workshops. More details of her profile are available at www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/cm542.

Ross Anderson - 'Temporal Node Centrality in Complex Networks'

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:43:15 GMT

Ross Anderson - "Temporal Node Centrality in Complex Networks"
This talk is based on joint work with my former student Hyoungshick Kim. Many networks are dynamic in that their topology changes rapidly – on the same time-scale as the communications of interest. Examples are the human contact networks involved in the transmission of disease, ad-hoc radio networks between moving vehicles, and the transactions between principals in a market. While we have good models of static networks, so far these have been lacking for the dynamic case.
I present a simple but powerful model, the time-ordered graph, which reduces a dynamic network to a static network with directed flows. This enables us to extend network properties such as vertex degree, closeness and betweenness centrality metrics in a very natural way to the dynamic case. We then demonstrate how this new model applies to a number of interesting edge cases, such as where the network connectivity depends on a small number of highly mobile vertices or edges, and show that our new centrality definition allows us to track the evolution of connectivity. Finally we apply our model and techniques to two real-world dynamic graphs of human contact networks and then discuss the implication of temporal centrality metrics in the real world.

Biographical Note
Ross Anderson is Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge University. He is one of the founders of a vigorously-growing new academic discipline, the economics of information security. Ross was also a seminal contributor to the idea of peer-to-peer systems and an inventor of the AES finalist encryption algorithm "Serpent". He also has well-known publications on many other technical security topics including hardware tamper-resistance, emission security, copyright marking, and the robustness of application programming interfaces (APIs). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Physics, the IET and the IMA. He also wrote the standard textbook "Security Engineering - a Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems".

Martin Everett - 'The dual projection approach for 2-mode networks'

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:38:42 GMT

Martin Everett - "The dual projection approach for 2-mode networks"
There have been two distinct approaches to two mode data. The first approach is to project the data to one mode and then analyze the projected network using standard single mode techniques. The second approach has been to extend methods and concepts to the two mode case and analyze the two mode network directly. In this paper we examine a general technique which combines these approaches and demonstrate the method using core-periphery models, structural equivalence and centrality.

Biographical Note
Martin holds a chair in social network analysis at the University of Manchester where he co-found and co-directs the Mitchell Centre for Social Network Analaysis. After completing a mathematics degree at Loughborough University and an MSc also in mathematics at Oxford he stayed at Oxford to complete a DPhil in networks under Clyde Mitchell. Martin has over 30 years experience of research in social networks and is a past president of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) and a Simmel award holder (the highest award given by the organization). He is a co-author of the software package UCINET the world’s most commonly used software for analyzing social network data. He has consulted extensively on the use of networks with government agencies as well as public and private companies.

Maxi San Miguel - 'What do we learn from simple models of social behavior?'

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:30:26 GMT

Maxi San Miguel - "What do we learn from simple models of social behavior?"
When does a social group reach agreement by imitation processes? I will discuss how we answer this question by considering the voter model, a paradigmatic example of simple model of social behavior. Aspects to be addressed include the role of tie heterogeneity and non persistent ties in social networks, as well as the heterogeneity in the timing of interactions and the coexistence of imitation and rational behavior. I will also discuss the competition between self-organization and external messages or mass media in models of social consensus.

Biographical Note
Maxi san Miguel is Professor of Physics at the University of the Balearic Islands (since 1986) and Director of IFISC (Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems, CSIC-UIB), Palma de Mallorca. He received the Medal of the Spanish Physical Society-Fundación BBVA in 2010, and his research activity spans the fields of Collective Dynamics in Social Systems; Complex Networks Statistical Physics; Dynamics of phase transitions; Stochastic processes and fluctuations in nonequilibrium systems; Nonlinear phenomena, pattern formation and spatio-temporal complexity; Laser noise, Nonlinear and quantum optics; Photonics: Semiconductor Lasers. He is the author of over 315 publications in refereed journals and books quoted over 7.200 times. (260 papers in the Web of Science quoted over 5,000 times. Over 50 citations in each of the 19 most quoted papers).

Sanjeev Goyal - 'Networks: contagion and resilience'

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:23:20 GMT

Sanjeev Goyal - "Networks: contagion and resilience"
Connections between individuals (persons, firms, banks, cities and countries) facilitate the exchange of goods, resources and information but they also expose an individual to threats and dangers faced by others.
A key element is that linking activity and investments in security are purposeful and take into account the activities of others. In some contexts threats are random (e.g., biological viruses or liquidity shocks to banks) while in others (e.g., hackers, criminals and military) the threats come from an ``intelligent'' adversary. As we vary the decision making powers regarding links and security and the nature of the threats, we trace out an ensemble of theoretical scenarios. A network is said to be resilient if it performs `well' in the face of threats.
I will talk about on-going work in which we:
1. Develop an economic framework for the study of resilient networks.
2. Develop general methods to solve models of resilience.
3. Apply these methods in applications in epidemiology, infrastructure, security and finance.

Biographical Note
Sanjeev Goyal, Professor of Economics and Fellow of Christ's College at the University of Cambridge, was educated at Delhi University, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, and Cornell University. He is a pioneer in the economic study of networks with publications in leading international journals such as Econometrica, American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies and Journal of Political Economy. His book `Connections: an Introduction to the economics of networks' was published by Princeton University Press in 2007. A Chinese translation appeared in 2010.

Bernardo Huberman - 'Social Media and Attention'

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:09:38 GMT

Bernardo Huberman - "Social Media and Attention"
The past decade has witnessed a momentous transformation in the way people interact and exchange information with each other. Content is now co-produced, shared, classified and rated on the Web by millions of people, while attention has become the ephemeral and valuable resource that everyone seeks to acquire.
This talk will focus on how social attention is allocated among all media and how it decays as novelty fades and new content is created. This will be followed by a description of the role that attention plays in the production and consumption of content within social media, how its dynamics can be used to predict future trends, and its connection with the emergence of a public agenda.

Biographical Note
Bernardo A. Huberman is a Senior HP Fellow and director of the Social Computing Research Group at HP Labs, which focuses on methods for harvesting the collective intelligence of groups of people in order to realize greater value from the interaction between users and information. Previous to HP, Huberman worked at Xerox PARC, where he did research on the physics of chaos, distributed systems and Internet characterization. Huberman is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, former trustee of the Aspen Center for Physics and Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
Huberman's main research focus is on the relationship between local actions and the global behavior of large, distributed systems. Areas of exploration include distributed knowledge, dynamics of social organizations and lately social media and the economics of attention. Much of his research has concentrated on the World Wide Web, with an emphasis on the dynamics of its growth and use. This work helped uncover the nature of electronic markets, the detailed structure of the web and the laws governing the way people surf for information. One of the originators of the field of ecology of computation, Huberman recently published the book, "The Laws of the Web: Patterns in the Ecology of Information," with MIT Press.
Huberman received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently a consulting professor in the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University. He has been a visiting professor at the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, the University of Paris, and Insead, the European School of Business in Fontainebleau, France.

Yasmin Merali - 'Welcome to the ASSYST Scientific Meeting on Social Networks and Social Media'

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 23:22:50 GMT

Yasmin Merali - "Introduction to the ASSYST Scientific Meeting on Social Networks and Social Media"

Jeff Johnson - 'Hypernetworks'

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 13:20:00 GMT

Talk presented at the ASSYST Workshop on Mathematics for the Dynamics of Multilevel Systems, held at the European Centre for Living Technology, Venice, 26th - 28th February 2012.

'Creative practice, complexity and the creative economy' Research Symposium

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 11:50:00 GMT

The role of complexity in the creative economies: connecting people, ideas and practice: a research project In the past 12 months, the organizers have been involved the AHRC funded project. The role of complexity in the creative economies: connecting people, ideas and practice (AH/J5001413/1). The project aimed to explore how complexity theory and its methodological approaches can help in providing a better understanding of the creative economy as a field of research by connecting various distinctive theoretical and methodological perspectives. The aim was to outline a broader analytical framework to bridge the interrelation of ideas, people and practices in the creative economy within broader socio, cultural and economic contexts. A detailed project outline is available online: http://bit.ly/wjbZ48

Nicky Hickman: “Private vs Social – the two faces of personal data”

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:04:00 GMT

Talk presented at the Interdisciplinary workshop on the evolution of social norms 15-16 December 2011, Henley-on-Thames, Henley Business school, Greenland campus https://sites.google.com/site/evolutionofsocialnorms/

Mason Porter (University of Oxford):“Social structure of Facebook networks”

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:02:00 GMT

Aurelie Charles (University of Bath): Social norms meet financialisation:fair-wage constraints and gender and race stratification in the US labour market

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:01:00 GMT

Sharad Goel (Yahoo! Research) :“The structure of online diffusion networks”

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:59:00 GMT

David Hales (Open University):“Rationality meets the tribe:Recent models of cultural group selection”

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:57:00 GMT

Marc Casson (University of Reading) : “Social Norms: An Economist’s Perspective”

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:55:00 GMT

The Briefing - R&D News

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

In the days where paper was king there was a good reason why lots of different publications covered the same stories: they had to serve their readers, and there was a good chance that they did not have the opportunity to read more than a few magazines a month. With the web, that has changed. People don’t copiously read a single magazine site, they surf the net.

ASSYST Workshop on Mathematics for the Dynamics of Multilevel Systems

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:30:00 GMT

Following highly successful meetings on Mathematics in the Science of Complex Systems at ECLT in Venice and Warwick University in February and June 2011, we are holding the meeting Mathematics for the Dynamics of Multilevel Systems at the European Centre for Living Technology, Venice, 26th - 28th February 2012.

The endogenous dynamics of markets: price impact and feedback loops

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 11:03:00 GMT

“The endogenous dynamics of markets: price impact and feedback loops” was presented by Jean-Philippe Bouchaud (Capital Fund Management, ESPCI Paris Tech, Ecole Polytechnique) at FET’11 - The European Future Technologies Conference and Exhibition - Science beyond fiction, a conference held in Budapest, May 4 – 6, 2011. The presentation is available at the FET’11 website. Abstract: “We review the evidence that the erratic dynamics of markets is to a large extent of endogenous origin, i.e. determined by the trading activity itself and not due to the rational processing of exogenous news. In order to understand why and how prices move, the joint fluctuations of order flow and liquidity – and the way these impact prices – become the keyingredients. Impact is necessary for private information to be reflected in prices, but by the same token, random fluctuations in order flow necessarily contribute to the volatility of markets. Our thesis is that the latter contribution is in fact dominant, resulting in a decoupling between prices and fundamental values, at least on short to medium time scales. We argue that markets operate in a regime of vanishing revealed liquidity, but large latent liquidity, which would explain their hyper-sensitivity to fluctuations. More precisely, we identify a dangerous feedback loop between bid-ask spread and volatility that may lead to microliquidity crises and price jumps. We discuss several other unstable feedback loops that should be relevant to account for market crises: imitation, unwarranted quantitative models, pro-cyclical regulation, etc.”

Bubble Trouble

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 10:53:00 GMT

When a stock market rises unsustainably, it can create a financial bubble that sooner or later will burst. Tobias Preis explains whether concepts from physics can be used to create a law describing exactly how such crashes occur. Tobias Preis is a scientist and founder of Artemis Capital Asset Management. He performed complex systems research at Boston University and ETH Zurich. He was awarded a Ph.D. in physics and is a member of the Gutenberg Academy. His current research focuses on quantifying and modeling financial market fluctuations. Recently, he headed a research team which provided evidence that search engine query data and stock market fluctuations are correlated. Web: tobiaspreis.de Twitter: @t_preis

Reports from ECCS11 Bursary Winners

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:55:00 GMT

One of the work packages of ASSYST is to provide conference support and, in particular, to attempt to increase variety in the CS community by supporting female scientists and minority groups. This year we provided 32 bursaries to people to attend ECCS’11. The bursaries provided limited contributions towards the conference fee and/or travel expenses for female scientists, young researchers, and others who would otherwise be unable to attend ECCS'11. There were also a number of conditions for receiving the bursary, one of which was to provide feedback about how they had benefitted from attending the conference. You can read the full reports at below.

Evostar 2012

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:27:00 GMT

Evostar 2012

International Meeting on Visualization in Complex Environments

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The International Meeting on Visualization in Complex Environments took place at Politecnico di Torino, November 17-18, 2011. The programme covered the tracks Visualization and Decision Making in Spatial Environments, Visualization and Scientific Data Exploration and Visualization and Communication.

African RoadMap

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The African RoadMap for Complex Systems Research is being developed following the "African Conference on the Science of Complex Systems" held on the 9th and 10th November 2011, in Dakar. The conference was an opportunity to discuss the African Roadmap and its Digital Campus - towards a UNESCO Unitwin Network.

ECCS12

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 16:27:00 GMT

European Conference on Complex Systems 2012