Related papers: Solving Society's Big Ills, A Small Step
When discussing future concerns within socio-technical systems in work contexts, we often find descriptions of missed technology development and integration. The experience of technology that fails whilst being integrated is often rooted in…
Understanding public perception of technology is crucial to aligning research, development, and governance of technology. This article introduces micro scenarios as an integrative method to evaluate mental models and social acceptance…
Transparency is often deemed critical to enable effective real-world deployment of intelligent systems. Yet the motivations for and benefits of different types of transparency can vary significantly depending on context, and objective…
This paper addresses decision-aiding problems that involve multiple objectives and uncertain states of the world. Inspired by the capability approach, we focus on cases where a policy maker chooses an act that, combined with a state of the…
Different types of reasoning impose different structural demands on representational systems, yet no systematic account of these demands exists across psychology, AI, and philosophy of mind. I propose a framework identifying four structural…
In the study of networked systems such as biological, technological, and social networks the available data are often uncertain. Rather than knowing the structure of a network exactly, we know the connections between nodes only with a…
Social learning, copying other's behavior without actual experience, offers a cost-effective means of knowledge acquisition. However, it raises the fundamental question of which individuals have reliable information: successful individuals…
Large Language Models (LLMs) can be deployed in situations where they process positive/negative interactions with other agents. We study how this is done under the sociological framework of social balance, which explains the emergence of…
Networks describe a range of social, biological and technical phenomena. An important property of a network is its degree correlation or assortativity, describing how nodes in the network associate based on their number of connections.…
It is very common to observe crowds of individuals solving similar problems with similar information in a largely independent manner. We argue here that crowds can become "smarter," i.e., more efficient and robust, by partially following…
One purpose -- quite a few thinkers would say the main purpose -- of seeking knowledge about the world is to enhance our ability to make good decisions. An item of knowledge that can make no conceivable difference with regard to anything we…
Small-world networks (SWN) are found to be closer to the real social systems than both regular and random lattices. Then, a model for the evolution of economic systems is generalized to SWN. The Sznajd model for the two-state opinion…
Social learning is defined as the ability of a population to aggregate information, a process which must crucially depend on the mechanisms of social interaction. Consumers choosing which product to buy, or voters deciding which option to…
A continuous-time Markov process is proposed to analyze how a group of humans solves a complex task, consisting in the search of the optimal set of decisions on a fitness landscape. Individuals change their opinions driven by two different…
Self-organization is frequently observed in active collectives, from ant rafts to molecular motor assemblies. General principles describing self-organization away from equilibrium have been challenging to identify. We offer a unifying…
The concept of complexity appears in virtually all areas of knowledge. Its intuitive meaning shares similarities across fields, but disagreements between its details hinders a general definition, leading to a plethora of proposed…
Community structure analysis is a powerful tool for social networks, which can simplify their topological and functional analysis considerably. However, since community detection methods have random factors and real social networks obtained…
The study of opinions, their formation and change, is one of the defining topics addressed by social psychology, but in recent years other disciplines, like computer science and complexity, have tried to deal with this issue. Despite the…
This paper explores the possibilities offered by informal communities of practice to operate as "prototyping spaces" for innovation in the context of developing economies. It begins by looking at the concept of "economic complexity" and how…
Networks have become a key approach to understanding systems of interacting objects, unifying the study of diverse phenomena including biological organisms and human society. One crucial step when studying the structure and dynamics of…