Related papers: The developmental dynamics of terrorist organizati…
Collective violence in direct confrontations between two opposing groups happens in short bursts wherein small subgroups briefly attack small numbers of opponents, while the others form a non-fighting audience. The mechanism is fighters'…
Empirical estimation of critical points at which complex systems abruptly flip from one state to another is among the remaining challenges in network science. However, due to the stochastic nature of critical transitions it is widely…
Terrorist attacks carried out by individuals or single cells have significantly accelerated over the last 20 years. This type of terrorism, defined as lone-actor (LA) terrorism, stands as one of the greatest security threats of our time.…
We aim to study through an agent-based model the cultural conditions leading to a decrease or an increase of discrimination between groups after a major cultural threat such as a terrorist attack. We propose an agent-based model of cultural…
The dynamics of a wide range of real systems, from email patterns to earthquakes, display a bursty, intermittent nature, characterized by short timeframes of intensive activity followed by long times of no or reduced activity. The…
We develop a discrete-event modeling framework that captures the progression of geophysical systems toward catastrophic failure through sequences of distinct damage events. By representing system evolution as a succession of temporally…
Human and artificial organizations may be described as networks of interacting parts. Those parts exchange data and control information and, as a result of these interactions, organizations produce emergent behaviors and purposes -- traits…
Even before 9/11 there were claims that the nature of war had changed fundamentally. The 9/11 attacks created an urgent need to understand contemporary wars and their relationship to older conventional and terrorist wars, both of which…
Our decision-making processes are becoming more data driven, based on data from multiple sources, of different types, processed by a variety of technologies. As technology becomes more relevant for decision processes, the more likely they…
We develop flexible multivariate spatio-temporal Hawkes process models to analyze patterns of terrorism. Previous applications of point process methods to political violence data mainly utilize temporal Hawkes process models, neglecting…
The success of a security attack crucially depends on time: the more time available to the attacker, the higher the probability of a successful attack. Formalisms such as Reliability block diagrams, Reliability graphs and Attack…
Civil unrest is a powerful form of collective human dynamics, which has led to major transitions of societies in modern history. The study of collective human dynamics, including collective aggression, has been the focus of much discussion…
Radicalization is the process by which people come to adopt increasingly extreme political or religious ideologies. While radical thinking is by no means problematic in itself, it becomes a threat to national security when it leads to…
Societal complexity may be at a historical peak. Distinct from entropy, complexity tends to rise as systems move away from order, crest at an intermediate state, and decline as entropy continues increasing. The use of a thermodynamic…
We analyze the fluctuations in the gross domestic product (GDP) of 152 countries for the period 1950--1992. We find that (i) the distribution of annual growth rates for countries of a given GDP decays with ``fatter'' tails than for a…
Terrorism has become one of the most tedious problems to deal with and a prominent threat to mankind. To enhance counter-terrorism, several research works are developing efficient and precise systems, data mining is not an exception.…
In the last decades, the notion that cities are in a state of equilibrium with a centralised organisation has given place to the viewpoint of cities in disequilibrium and organised from bottom to up. In this perspective, cities are evolving…
Given the extreme heterogeneity of actors and groups participating in terrorist actions, investigating and assessing their characteristics can be important to extract relevant information and enhance the knowledge on their behaviors. The…
Human interactions can be either positive or negative, giving rise to different complex social or anti-social phenomena. The dynamics of these interactions often lead to certain spatio-temporal patterns and complex networks, which can be…
Records of social interactions provide us with new sources of data for understanding how interaction patterns affect collective dynamics. Such human activity patterns are often bursty, i.e., they consist of short periods of intense activity…