Related papers: Resilience and elasticity of co-evolving informati…
With social media and the according social and ubiquitous applications finding their way into everyday life, there is a rapidly growing amount of user generated content yielding explicit and implicit network structures. We consider social…
Understanding human-nature interactions and the architecture of coupled human-nature systems is crucial for sustainable development. Cultural ecosystem services (CES), defined as intangible benefits derived from nature exposure, contribute…
Social ecological systems are often difficult to investigate and manage because of their inherent complexity1. Small variations in external drivers can lead to abrupt changes associated with instabilities and bifurcations in the underlying…
Recent research has shown the deep impact of the dynamics of human interactions (or temporal social networks) on the spreading of information, opinion formation, etc. In general, the bursty nature of human interactions lowers the…
In communication networks structure and dynamics are tightly coupled. The structure controls the flow of information and is itself shaped by the dynamical process of information exchanged between nodes. In order to reconcile structure and…
Like other social animals and biological systems, human groups constantly exchange information. Network models provide a way of quantifying this process by representing the pathways of information propagation between individuals. Existing…
Social connectivity is the key process that characterizes the structural properties of social networks and in turn processes such as navigation, influence or information diffusion. Since time, attention and cognition are inelastic…
Technological systems increasingly mediate human information exchange, spanning interactions among humans as well as between humans and artificial agents. The unprecedented scale and reliance on information disseminated through these…
Networks are fundamental for our understanding of complex systems. Interactions between individual nodes in networks generate network motifs - small recurrent patterns that can be considered the network's building-block components,…
Social networks offer users new means of accessing information, essentially relying on "social filtering", i.e. propagation and filtering of information by social contacts. The sheer amount of data flowing in these networks, combined with…
To investigate the role of information flow in group formation, we introduce a model of communication and social navigation. We let agents gather information in an idealized network society, and demonstrate that heterogeneous groups can…
Demonstrations, protests, riots, and shifts in public opinion respond to the coordinating potential of communication networks. Digital technologies have turned interpersonal networks into massive, pervasive structures that constantly…
Humans stand alone in terms of their potential to collectively and cumulatively change their culture in an open-ended manner. This open-endedness provides societies with the ability to continually expand their resources and to increase…
Active systems across scales, ranging from molecular machines to human crowds, are usually modeled as assemblies of self-propelled particles driven by internally generated forces. However, these models often assume memoryless dynamics and…
From families to nations, what binds individuals in social groups is the degree to which they share beliefs, norms, and memories. While local clusters of communicating individuals can sustain shared memories and norms, communities…
We investigate the emergence and persistence of communities through a recently proposed mechanism of adaptive rewiring in coevolutionary networks. We characterize the topological structures arising in a coevolutionary network subject to an…
This white paper lays out a vision of research and development in the field of artificial intelligence for the next decade (and beyond). Its denouement is a cyber-physical ecosystem of natural and synthetic sense-making, in which humans are…
Despite the obvious advantage of simple life forms capable of fast replication, different levels of cognitive complexity have been achieved by living systems in terms of their potential to cope with environmental uncertainty. Against 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…
New product development needs new engineering approaches. Knowledge is a key resource that impacts traditional, organisational, economic and innovative models. Through NICT (New Information and Communication Technologies), globalisation…