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We consider two new problems regarding the impact of edge addition or removal on the modularity of partitions (or community structures) in a network. The first problem seeks to add edges to enforce that a desired partition is the partition…
This chapter does not deal with specific tools and techniques for managing complex systems, but proposes some basic concepts that help us to think and speak about complexity. We review classical thinking and its intrinsic drawbacks when…
While functional programming is an efficient way to express complex software, functional programming languages have a steep learning curve. Haskell can be challenging to learn for students who were only introduced to imperative programming.…
End-user programmers create software to solve problems, yet the problem-solving knowledge generated in the process often remains tacit within the software artifact. One approach to exposing this knowledge is to enable the end-user to…
Many widely used models amount to an elaborate means of making up numbers--but once a number has been produced, it tends to be taken seriously and its source (the model) is rarely examined carefully. Many widely used models have little…
Existing statistical approaches to natural language problems are very coarse approximations to the true complexity of language processing. As such, no single technique will be best for all problem instances. Many researchers are examining…
We intend to demonstrate the innate problems with existing spreadsheet products and to show how to tackle these issues using a new type of spreadsheet program called Resolver. It addresses the issues head-on and thereby moves the 1980's…
Insightful interdisciplinary collaboration is essential to the principled governance of technology. When such efforts address the interaction between computation and society, they often focus on modeling, the process by which computer…
Students' difficulties in quantum mechanics may be the result of unproductive framing rather than a fundamental inability to solve the problems or misconceptions about physics content. Using the theoretical lens of epistemological framing,…
Spreadsheets often need changing in ways made tedious and risky by Excel. For example: simultaneously altering many tables' size, orientation, and position; inserting cross-tabulations; moving data between sheets; splitting and merging…
Software development, often perceived as a technical endeavor, is fundamentally a social activity requiring collaboration among team members. Acknowledging this, the software development community has devised strategies to address possible…
Spreadsheets that are informally created are harder to test than they should be. Simple cross-foot checks or being easily readable are modest but attainable goals for every spreadsheet developer. This paper lists some tips on building…
Although widely used in practice, the behavior and accuracy of the popular module identification technique called modularity maximization is not well understood in practical contexts. Here, we present a broad characterization of its…
This paper is concerned with learners who aim to learn patterns in infinite binary sequences: shown longer and longer initial segments of a binary sequence, they either attempt to predict whether the next bit will be a 0 or will be a 1 or…
Spreadsheets provide a flexible and easy to use software development environment, but that leads to error proneness. Work has been done to prevent errors in spreadsheets, including using models to specify distinct parts of a spreadsheet as…
We describe various errors in the mathematical literature, and consider how some of them might have been avoided, or at least detected at an earlier stage, using tools such as Maple or Sage. Our examples are drawn from three broad…
This paper introduces and defends an account of model-based science that I dub model pluralism. I argue that despite a growing awareness in the philosophy of science literature of the multiplicity, diversity, and richness of models and…
We introduce a new class of scheduling problems in which the optimization is performed by the worker (single ``machine'') who performs the tasks. A typical worker's objective is to minimize the amount of work he does (he is ``lazy''), or…
There are countless reasons cited in scientific studies to explain the difficulties in programming learning. The reasons range from the subject's complexity, the ineffective teaching and study methods, to psychological aspects such as…
Deep reinforcement learning has shown its effectiveness in various applications, providing a promising direction for solving tasks with high complexity. However, naively applying classical RL for learning a complex long-horizon task with a…