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Influence theory is a foundational theory of physics that is not based on traditional empirically defined concepts, such as positions in space and time, mass, energy, or momentum. Instead, the aim is to derive these concepts, and their…
Academic research groups are treated as complex systems and their cooperative behaviour is analysed from a mathematical and statistical viewpoint. Contrary to the naive expectation that the quality of a research group is simply given by the…
Cities are systems with a large number of constituents and agents interacting with each other and can be considered as emblematic of complex systems. Modeling these systems is a real challenge and triggered the interest of many disciplines…
Science progresses by building upon previous discoveries. It is commonly believed that the impact of scientific papers, as measured by citations, is positively correlated with the impact of past discoveries built upon. However, analyzing…
Problems for evaluation and impact of published scientific works and their authors are discussed. The role of citations in this process is pointed out. Different bibliometric indicators are reviewed in this connection and ways for…
Over the last few decades, the nature of scientific research has changed in response to external influences. Firstly, powerful networked computers have become a standard tool. Secondly, society presses ever harder for research to deliver…
The dynamical origin of opinion polarization in the real world is an interesting topic physical scientists may help to understand. To properly model the dynamics, the theory must be fully compatible with findings by social psychologists on…
Collaboration is a key driver of science and innovation. Mainly motivated by the need to leverage different capacities and expertise to solve a scientific problem, collaboration is also an excellent source of information about the future…
In modern interconnected societies, opinions and beliefs can quickly spread across large populations, giving rise to collective behaviors such as the adoption of social norms or polarization. These phenomena have motivated many models aimed…
Social media users share their ideas, thoughts, and emotions with other users. However, it is not clear how online users would respond to new research outcomes. This study aims to predict the nature of the emotions expressed by Twitter…
One of the most interesting scientific challenges nowadays deals with the analysis and the understanding of complex networks' dynamics. A major issue is the definition of new frameworks for the exploration of the dynamics at play in real…
It is shown, that the Boltzmann-like equations allow the formulation of a very general model for behavioral changes. This model takes into account spontaneous (or externally induced) behavioral changes and behavioral changes by pair…
Information-communication technology promotes collaborative environments like Wikipedia where, however, controversiality and conflicts can appear. To describe the rise, persistence, and resolution of such conflicts we devise an extended…
Opinion dynamics concerns social processes through which populations or groups of individuals agree or disagree on specific issues. As such, modelling opinion dynamics represents an important research area that has been progressively…
In recent years, statistical physics' methodologies have proven extremely successful in offering insights into the mechanisms that govern social interactions. However, the question of whether these models are able to capture trends observed…
Images become an important and prevalent way to express users' activities, opinions and emotions. In a social network, individual emotions may be influenced by others, in particular by close friends. We focus on understanding how users…
Following a long tradition of physicists who have noticed that the Ising model provides a general background to build realistic models of social interactions, we study a model of financial price dynamics resulting from the collective…
We introduce a new opinion dynamics model where a group of agents holds two kinds of opinions: inherent and declared. Each agent's inherent opinion is fixed and unobservable by the other agents. At each time step, agents broadcast their…
This is the English version of my inaugural lecture at Coll\`ege de France in 2021, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxktplKMhKU. I reflect on the difficulty of multi-disciplinary research, which often hinges of unexpected…
The goal of Science is to understand phenomena and systems in order to predict their development and gain control over them. In the scientific process of knowledge elaboration, a crucial role is played by models which, in the language of…