Related papers: A question of scale
The enormous increase of popularity and use of the WWW has led in the recent years to important changes in the ways people communicate. An interesting example of this fact is provided by the now very popular social annotation systems,…
This contribution describes efforts to model the behavior of individual pedestrians and their interactions in crowds, which generate certain kinds of self-organized patterns of motion. Moreover, this article focusses on the dynamics of…
Dynamical networks are important models for the behaviour of complex systems, modelling physical, biological and societal systems, including the brain, food webs, epidemic disease in populations, power grids and many other. Such dynamical…
We present a model of soft active particles that leads to a rich array of collective behavior found also in dense biological swarms of bacteria and other unicellular organisms. Our model uses only local interactions, such as Vicsek-type…
To uncover underlying mechanism of collective human dynamics, we survey more than 1.8 billion blog entries and observe the statistical properties of word appearances. We focus on words that show dynamic growth and decay with a tendency to…
The collective effort exceeds the sum of its parts when individuals coordinate and regulate their activities and behaviors. This holds true even in self-organizing systems with open, voluntary participation where coordination occurs…
Coordination is a fundamental aspect of life. The advent of social media has made it integral also to online human interactions, such as those that characterize thriving online communities and social movements. At the same time,…
In many natural synchronization phenomena, communication between individual elements occurs not directly, but rather through the environment. One of these instances is bacterial quorum sensing, where bacteria release signaling molecules in…
The emerging collective motions of swarms of interacting agents are a subject of great interest in application areas ranging from biology to physics and robotics. In this paper, we conduct a careful analysis of the collective dynamics of a…
Despite recent advances in uncovering the quantitative features of stationary human activity patterns, many applications, from pandemic prediction to emergency response, require an understanding of how these patterns change when the…
A new approach for the description of phenomena of social aggregation is suggested. On the basis of psychological concepts (as for instance social norms and cultural coordinates), we deduce a general mechanism for the social aggregation in…
This paper provides an overview and critical analysis on the modeling and applications of the dynamics of human crowds, where social interactions can have an important influence on the behavioral dynamics of the crowd viewed as a living,…
Collaborative tagging has been quickly gaining ground because of its ability to recruit the activity of web users into effectively organizing and sharing vast amounts of information. Here we collect data from a popular system and…
Living groups move in complex environments and are constantly subject to external stimuli, predatory attacks and disturbances. An efficient response to such perturbations is vital to maintain the group's coherence and cohesion.…
Most of us must have been fascinated by the eye catching displays of collectively moving animals. Schools of fish can move in a rather orderly fashion and then change direction amazingly abruptly. There are a huge number of further examples…
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'…
Large-scale online campaigns, malicious or otherwise, require a significant degree of coordination among participants, which sparked interest in the study of coordinated online behavior. State-of-the-art methods for detecting coordinated…
Collective motion is a manifestation of emergent phenomena in medium-heavy and heavy nuclei. A relatively large number of constituent nucleons contribute coherently to nuclear excitations (vibrations, rotations) that are characterized by…
Collective animal movement fascinates children and scientists alike. One of the most commonly given explanations for collective animal movement is improved foraging. Animals are hypothesized to gain from searching for food in groups. Here,…
Living in groups brings benefits to many animals, such as a protection against predators and an improved capacity for sensing and making decisions while searching for resources in uncertain environments. A body of studies has shown how…