Related papers: A bare-bones mathematical model of radicalization

Current approaches to building general-purpose AI systems tend to produce systems with both beneficial and harmful capabilities. Further progress in AI development could lead to capabilities that pose extreme risks, such as offensive cyber…

Threat modelling is the process of identifying potential vulnerabilities in a system and prioritising them. Existing threat modelling tools focus primarily on technical systems and are not as well suited to interpersonal threats. In this…

Classification problems in security settings are usually contemplated as confrontations in which one or more adversaries try to fool a classifier to obtain a benefit. Most approaches to such adversarial classification problems have focused…

Analyzing ideology and polarization is of critical importance in advancing our grasp of modern politics. Recent research has made great strides towards understanding the ideological bias (i.e., stance) of news media along the left-right…

Complexity is an interdisciplinary concept which, first of all, addresses the question of how order emerges out of randomness. For many reasons matrices provide a very practical and powerful tool in approaching and quantifying the related…

The rise in eating disorders, a condition with serious health complications, has been linked to the proliferation of idealized body images on social media platforms. However, the relationship between social media and eating disorders is…

Discussions of political disagreement emphasize two patterns: polarization, where beliefs diverge toward opposite extremes on each issue dimension; and issue alignment, where individuals' views across issues become more internally…

Terrorist attacks not only harm citizens but also shift their attention, which has long-lasting impacts on public opinion and government policies. Yet measuring the changes in public attention beyond media coverage has been methodologically…

Uncertainty can be classified as either aleatoric (intrinsic randomness) or epistemic (imperfect knowledge of parameters). The majority of frameworks assessing infectious disease risk consider only epistemic uncertainty. We only ever…

Opinion polarization is on the rise, causing concerns for the openness of public debates. Additionally, extreme opinions on different topics often show significant correlations. The dynamics leading to these polarized ideological opinions…

Since the seminal work from F. Cohen in the eighties, abstract virology has seen the apparition of successive viral models, all based on Turing-equivalent formalisms. But considering recent malware such as rootkits or k-ary codes, these…

This study extends classical models of spreading epidemics to describe the phenomenon of contagious public outrage, which eventually leads to the spread of violence following a disclosure of some unpopular political decisions and/or…

Ideological leanings of an individual can often be gauged by the sentiment one expresses about different issues. We propose a simple framework that represents a political ideology as a distribution of sentiment polarities towards a set of…

Epidemic disease spreading is conventionally often modelled and analyzed by means of rate and diffusion equations, following the paradigms of well-controlled chemical reactions and diffusive dynamics in a test tube. Yet, serious worries…

Models of opinion dynamics play a major role in various disciplines, including economics, political science, psychology, and social science, as they provide a framework for analysis and intervention. In spite of the numerous mathematical…

Radicalized beliefs, such as those tied to QAnon, Russiagate, and other political conspiracy theories, can lead some individuals and groups to engage in violent behavior, as evidenced in recent months. Understanding the mechanisms by which…

Global recruitment into radical Islamic movements has spurred renewed interest in the appeal of political extremism. Is the appeal a rational response to material conditions or is it the expression of psychological and personality disorders…

The emergence of opinion polarization within human communities -- the phenomenon that individuals within a society tend to develop conflicting attitudes related to the greatest diversity of topics -- has been a focus of interest for…

I study an election between two ideologically polarized parties that are both office- and policy-motivated. The parties compete by proposing policies on a single issue. The analysis uncovers a non-monotonic relationship between ideological…

Current threat models typically consider all possible ways an attacker can penetrate a system and assign probabilities to each path according to some metric (e.g. time-to-compromise). In this paper we discuss how this view hinders the…