Related papers: Ultrametricity increases the predictability of cul…
Contagion, a concept from epidemiology, has long been used to characterize social influence on people's behavior and affective (emotional) states. While it has revealed many useful insights, it is not clear whether the contagion metaphor is…
We study hierarchical clusterings of metric spaces that change over time. This is a natural geometric primitive for the analysis of dynamic data sets. Specifically, we introduce and study the problem of finding a temporally coherent…
Prediction polling is an increasingly popular form of crowdsourcing in which multiple participants estimate the probability or magnitude of some future event. These estimates are then aggregated into a single forecast. Historically,…
We present a strategy capable of describing basic features of the dynamics of crowds. The behaviour of the crowd is considered from a twofold perspective. We examine both the large scale behaviour of the crowd, and phenomena happening at…
In the past decades human activities caused global Earth system changes, e.g., climate change or biodiversity loss. Simultaneously, these associated impacts have increased environmental awareness within societies across the globe, thereby…
There is an urgent need to incorporate the perspectives of culturally diverse groups into AI developments. We present a novel conceptual framework for research that aims to expand, reimagine, and reground mainstream visions of AI using…
Understanding the quality of a performance evaluation metric is crucial for ensuring that model outputs align with human preferences. However, it remains unclear how well each metric captures the diverse aspects of these preferences, as…
Culturomics was recently introduced as the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture. Here we make use of this data by investigating fluctuations in yearly usage frequencies of specific words…
Culture involves the origination and transmission of ideas, but the conditions in which culture can emerge and evolve are unclear. We constructed and studied a highly simplified neural-network model of these processes. In this model ideas…
Social discrimination seems to be a persistent phenomenon in many cultures. It is important to understand the mechanisms that lead people to judge others by the group to which they belong, rather than individual qualities. It was recently…
Applying a machine learning model for decision-making in the real world requires to distinguish what the model knows from what it does not. A critical factor in assessing the knowledge of a model is to quantify its predictive uncertainty.…
We introduce a two-parameter ensemble of random discrete-time Markov models that simultaneously captures critical slowing down and broken detailed balance. Extending a previously studied heterogeneous Markov ensemble, we incorporate…
It is shown that, in certain circumstances, systems of cultural rules may be represented by doubly stochastic matrices denoted called possibility transforms, and by certain real valued possibility densities with inner product. Using such…
Network--based epidemic models that account for heterogeneous contact patterns are extensively used to predict and control the diffusion of infectious diseases. We use census and survey data to reconstruct a geo--referenced and…
How to estimate heterogeneity, e.g. the effect of some variable differing across observations, is a key question in political science. Methods for doing so make simplifying assumptions about the underlying nature of the heterogeneity to…
How do shared conventions emerge in complex decentralized social systems? This question engages fields as diverse as linguistics, sociology and cognitive science. Previous empirical attempts to solve this puzzle all presuppose that formal…
Decision-making individuals often imitate their highest-earning fellows rather than optimize their own utilities, due to bounded rationality and incomplete information. Perpetual fluctuations between decisions have been reported as the…
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…
In this paper we propose a classification of crowd models in built environments based on the assumed pedestrian ability to foresee the movements of other walkers. At the same time, we introduce a new family of macroscopic models, which make…
The fundamental building block of social influence is for one person to elicit a response in another. Researchers measuring a "response" in social media typically depend either on detailed models of human behavior or on platform-specific…