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The diverse range of Internet enabled devices both mobile and fixed has not only impacted the global economy but the very fabric of human communications and lifestyles. The ease of access and lowered cost has enabled hitherto diametrically…

We present the results of two studies on how individuals interact with each other during a international, interdisciplinary scientific conference. We first show that contact activity is highly variable across the two conferences and between…

As humans, we have a remarkable capacity for reading the characteristics of objects only by observing how another person carries them. Indeed, how we perform our actions naturally embeds information on the item features. Collaborative…

Modern societies feature an increasing contact between cultures, yet we have a poor understanding of what the outcomes might be. Here we consider a mathematical model of contact between social groups, grounded in social psychology and…

Socio-diversity, the variety of human opinions, ideas, behaviors and styles, has profound implications for social systems. While it fuels innovation, productivity, and collective intelligence, it can also complicate communication and erode…

We employ an agent-based model for cultural dynamics to investigate the effects of spatial heterogeneities on the collective behavior of a social system. We introduce heterogeneity as a random distribution of defects or imperfections in a…

The development of cooperative relations within and between firms plays an important role in the successful implementation of business strategy. How to produce such relations is less well understood. We build on work in relational contract…

Interpersonal spoken communication is central to human interaction and the exchange of information. Such interactive processes involve not only speech and spoken language but also non-verbal cues such as hand gestures, facial expressions,…

Wearables activity trackers are becoming widely adopted to understand individual behavior. Understanding behavior may help in self-regulation such as self-monitoring, goal-setting, self-corrective, etc.; Nevertheless, challenges exist in…

Individuals interact and cooperate in structured systems. Many studies represent this structure using static networks, where each link represents a permanent connection between two nodes. However, real interactions are generally not…

Discovering the antecedents of individuals' influence in collaborative environments is an important, practical, and challenging problem. In this paper, we study interpersonal influence in small groups of individuals who collectively execute…

Context: Social aspects are of high importance for being successful using agile methods in software development. People are influenced by their cultural imprint, as the underlying cultural values are guiding us in how we think and act.…

Firm clusters are seen as having a positive effect on innovations, what can be interpreted as economies of scale or knowledge spillovers. The processes underlying the success of these clusters remain difficult to isolate. We propose in this…

Innovation is to organizations what evolution is to organisms: it is how organisations adapt to changes in the environment and improve. Governments, institutions and firms that innovate are more likely to prosper and stand the test of time;…

The remarkable ecological success of humans is often attributed to our ability to develop complex cultural artefacts that enable us to cope with environmental challenges. The evolution of complex culture (cumulative cultural evolution) is…

In some systems, the behavior of the constituent units can create a `context' that modifies the direct interactions among them. This mechanism of indirect modification inspired us to develop a minimal model of context-dependent spreading.…

Fashion is intertwined with external cultural factors, but identifying these links remains a manual process limited to only the most salient phenomena. We propose a data-driven approach to identify specific cultural factors affecting the…

The emergence of cooperation in the groups of interacting agents is one of the most fascinating phenomena observed in many complex systems studied in social science and ecology, even in the situations where one would expect the agent to use…

Human travelling behaviours are markedly regular, to a large extent, predictable, and mostly driven by biological necessities (\eg sleeping, eating) and social constructs (\eg school schedules, synchronisation of labour). Not surprisingly,…

Individual differences in learning behavior within social groups, whether in humans, other animals, or among robots, can have significant effects on collective task performance. This is because it can affect individuals' response to the…