Related papers: Exploration and Exploitation of Victorian Science …
The general problem of "information foraging" in an environment about which agents have incomplete information has been explored in many fields, including cognitive psychology, neuroscience, economics, finance, ecology, and computer…
Some scientists are more likely to explore unfamiliar research topics while others tend to exploit existing ones. In previous work, correlations have been found between scientists' topic choices and their career performances. However,…
The selection of research topics by scientists can be viewed as an exploration process conducted by individuals with cognitive limitations traversing a complex cognitive landscape influenced by both individual and social factors. While…
From 1837, when he returned to England aboard the $\textit{HMS Beagle}$, to 1860, just after publication of $\textit{The Origin of Species}$, Charles Darwin kept detailed notes of each book he read or wanted to read. His notes and…
Information foraging connects optimal foraging theory in ecology with how humans search for information. The theory suggests that, following an information scent, the information seeker must optimize the tradeoff between exploration by…
It is a matter of debate whether a shrinking proportion of scholarly literature is getting most of the references over time. It is also less well understood how a narrowing literature usage would affect the circulation of ideas in the…
A sequential decision-making agent balances between exploring to gain new knowledge about an environment and exploiting current knowledge to maximize immediate reward. For environments studied in the traditional literature, optimal…
We consider information filtering, in which we face a stream of items too voluminous to process by hand (e.g., scientific articles, blog posts, emails), and must rely on a computer system to automatically filter out irrelevant items. Such…
We analyze the publication records of individual scientists, aiming to quantify the topic switching dynamics of scientists and its influence. For each scientist, the relations among her publications are characterized via shared references.…
The exploration-exploitation trade-off is central to the description of adaptive behaviour in fields ranging from machine learning, to biology, to economics. While many approaches have been taken, one approach to solving this trade-off has…
Modern data is messy and high-dimensional, and it is often not clear a priori what are the right questions to ask. Instead, the analyst typically needs to use the data to search for interesting analyses to perform and hypotheses to test.…
We consider a ubiquitous scenario in the Internet economy when individual decision-makers (henceforth, agents) both produce and consume information as they make strategic choices in an uncertain environment. This creates a three-way…
The main objective of this paper is to outline a theoretical framework to analyse how humans' decision-making strategies under uncertainty manage the trade-off between information gathering (exploration) and reward seeking (exploitation). A…
The ability to explore efficiently and effectively is a central challenge of reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider exploration through the lens of information theory. Specifically, we cast exploration as a problem of maximizing…
Despite persistent efforts in revealing the temporal patterns in scientific careers, little attention has been paid to the spatial patterns of scientific activities in the knowledge space. Here, drawing on millions of papers in six…
Literature search is arguably one of the most important phases of the academic and non-academic research. The increase in the number of published papers each year makes manual search inefficient and furthermore insufficient. Hence,…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
Dunnell's (1989) explanation for cultural elaboration proposed that elaboration could be a consequence of selection within uncertain environments. He developed the theory to the extent that it performed well explaining the distribution of…
In an information-rich world, people's time and attention must be divided among rapidly changing information sources and the diverse tasks demanded of them. How people decide which of the many sources, such as scientific articles or…
Although Darwinian models are rampant in the social sciences, social scientists do not face the problem that motivated Darwin's theory of natural selection: the problem of explaining how lineages evolve despite that any traits they acquire…