Related papers: Controllability of the Voter Model: an information…
Influence diagram is a graphical representation of belief networks with uncertainty. This article studies the structural properties of a probabilistic model in an influence diagram. In particular, structural controllability theorems and…
Integrity of elections is vital to democratic systems, but it is frequently threatened by malicious actors. The study of algorithmic complexity of the problem of manipulating election outcomes by changing its structural features is known as…
A fundamental concept in control theory is that of controllability, where any system state can be reached through an appropriate choice of control inputs. Indeed, a large body of classical and modern approaches are designed for controllable…
We propose an information-theoretic framework for analyzing control systems based on the close relationship of controllers to communication channels. A communication channel takes an input state and transforms it into an output state. A…
The control of complex systems is an ongoing challenge of complexity research. Recent advances using concepts of structural control deduce a wide range of control related properties from the network representation of complex systems. Here,…
In this study, we adopt age of information as a measure of the staleness of information, and take initial steps towards analyzing the control performance of stochastic systems with stale information. Our goals are to cast light on a…
We study the noisy voter model using a specific non-linear dependence of the rates that takes into account collective interaction between individuals. The resulting model is solved exactly under the all-to-all coupling configuration and…
The integrity of elections is central to democratic systems. However, a myriad of malicious actors aspire to influence election outcomes for financial or political benefit. A common means to such ends is by manipulating perceptions of the…
This Thesis explores how tools from Statistical Physics and Information Theory can help us describe and understand complex systems. In the first part, we study the interplay between internal interactions, environmental changes, and…
We propose a new analytical method to study stochastic, binary-state models on complex networks. Moving beyond the usual mean-field theories, this alternative approach is based on the introduction of an annealed approximation for…
Understanding a complex system entails capturing the non-trivial collective phenomena that arise from interactions between its different parts. Information theory is a flexible and robust framework to study such behaviours, with several…
Stochastic processes offer a flexible mathematical formalism to model and reason about systems. Most analysis tools, however, start from the premises that models are fully specified, so that any parameters controlling the system's dynamics…
The voter model is a classical interacting particle system modelling how consensus is formed across a network. We analyse the time to consensus for the voter model when the underlying graph is a subcritical scale-free random graph.…
Stochastic dynamic control systems relate in a prob- abilistic fashion the space of control signals to the space of corresponding future states. Consequently, stochastic dynamic systems can be interpreted as an information channel between…
Structural controllability has been proposed as an analytical framework for making predictions regarding the control of complex networks across myriad disciplines in the physical and life sciences (Liu et al., Nature:473(7346):167-173,…
The election control problem through social influence asks to find a set of nodes in a social network of voters to be the starters of a political campaign aiming at supporting a given target candidate. Voters reached by the campaign change…
A recently proposed model of social interaction in voting is investigated by simplifying it down into a version that is more analytically tractable and which allows a mathematical analysis to be performed. This analysis clarifies the…
The flourishing of fake news is favored by recommendation algorithms of online social networks which, based on previous users activity, provide content adapted to their preferences and so create filter bubbles. We introduce an analytically…
We prove a general existence result in stochastic optimal control in discrete time where controls take values in conditional metric spaces, and depend on the current state and the information of past decisions through the evolution of a…
A joint characterisation of the controllability and observability of a particular kind of discrete system has been developed. The key idea of the procedure can be reduced to a correct choice of the sampling sequence. This freedom, owing to…