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Complex data in social and natural sciences find effective representation through networks, wherein quantitative and categorical information can be associated with nodes and connecting edges. The internal structure of networks can be…
Big data and algorithmic risk prediction tools promise to improve criminal justice systems by reducing human biases and inconsistencies in decision making. Yet different, equally-justifiable choices when developing, testing, and deploying…
Virtually anything can be and is ranked; people, institutions, countries, words, genes. Rankings reduce complex systems to ordered lists, reflecting the ability of their elements to perform relevant functions, and are being used from…
A general theory of innovation and progress in human society is outlined, based on the combat between two opposite forces (conservatism/inertia and speculative herding "bubble" behavior). We contend that human affairs are characterized by…
We can overcome uncertainty with uncertainty. Using randomness in our choices and in what we control, and hence in the decision making process, could potentially offset the uncertainty inherent in the environment and yield better outcomes.…
Classic economic science is reaching the limits of its explanatory powers. Complexity science uses an increasingly larger set of different methods to analyze physical, biological, cultural, social, and economic factors, providing a broader…
Many complex systems in nature and society can be described in terms of networks capturing the intricate web of connections among the units they are made of. A key question is how to interpret the global organization of such networks as the…
Like all natural systems, great societies and their cultures emerge by a growth process from their environments, developing, organized, and behaving as wholes with their internal designs linked with their external worlds. So the general…
Decision-making in complex systems often relies on machine learning models, yet highly accurate models such as XGBoost and neural networks can obscure the reasoning behind their predictions. In operations research applications,…
We review three studies of information flow in social networks that help reveal their underlying social structure, how information spreads through them and why small world experiments work.
The moral foundations theory supports that people, across cultures, tend to consider a small number of dimensions when classifying issues on a moral basis. The data also show that the statistics of weights attributed to each moral dimension…
In-depth studies of sociotechnical systems are largely limited to single instances. Network surveys are expensive, and platforms vary in important ways, from interface design, to social norms, to historical contingencies. With single…
Over the past decade network theory has turned out to be a powerful methodology to investigate complex systems of various sorts. Through data analysis, modeling, and simulation quite an unparalleled insight into their structure, function,…
Identifying and understanding modular organizations is centrally important in the study of complex systems. Several approaches to this problem have been advanced, many framed in information-theoretic terms. Our treatment starts from the…
Cooperation is central to the success of human societies as it is crucial for overcoming some of the most pressing social challenges of our time. Yet how human cooperation is achieved and may persist is still a main puzzle in the social and…
Resilience denotes the capacity of a system to withstand shocks and its ability to recover from them. We develop a framework to quantify the resilience of highly volatile, non-equilibrium social organizations, such as collectives or…
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…
Many networks in natural and human-made systems exhibit scale-free properties and are small worlds. Now we show that people's understanding of complex systems in their cognitive maps also follow a scale-free topology. People focus on a few…
Scoring systems, as a type of predictive model, have significant advantages in interpretability and transparency and facilitate quick decision-making. As such, scoring systems have been extensively used in a wide variety of industries such…
Quality aspects such as ethics, fairness, and transparency have been proven to be essential for trustworthy software systems. Explainability has been identified not only as a means to achieve all these three aspects in systems, but also as…