Related papers: A Quest for Knowledge
Why do firms produce scientific research and make it available to the public, including their rivals? Prior literature has emphasized the tension between imitation risks from disclosure and scientists' preferences for publication. This…
Exploration is one of the core challenges in reinforcement learning. A common formulation of curiosity-driven exploration uses the difference between the real future and the future predicted by a learned model. However, predicting the…
Robots can learn the right reward function by querying a human expert. Existing approaches attempt to choose questions where the robot is most uncertain about the human's response; however, they do not consider how easy it will be for the…
We study the impact of endogenous attention in a dynamic social media model. Each period, a user observes a random story and decides whether to share it. Users like sharing true and interesting stories, but identifying false stories…
Imitation is an important learning heuristic in animal and human societies. Previous explorations report that the fate of individuals with cooperative strategies is sensitive to the protocol of imitation, leading to a conundrum about how…
While diversity has become a debated issue in design, very little research exists on positive use-cases for diversity beyond scholarly criticism. The current work addresses this gap through the case of a diversity-aware chatbot, exploring…
Adaptive exploration methods propose ways to learn complex policies via alternating between exploration and exploitation. An important question for such methods is to determine the appropriate moment to switch between exploration and…
A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…
Technological cumulativeness is considered one of the main mechanisms for technological progress, yet its exact meaning and dynamics often remain unclear. To develop a better understanding of this mechanism we approach a technology as a…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
As the quantity of human knowledge increasing rapidly, it is harder and harder to evaluate a knowledge worker's knowledge quantitatively. There are lots of demands for evaluating a knowledge worker's knowledge. For example, accurately…
Cosmos has always sparked human curiosity to unveil and speculate its fascinating secrets. This curiosity has ultimately opened a window to other worlds. After years of observation, computation, and data analysis, scientists have revealed…
Innovation and obsolescence describe the dynamics of ever-churning social and biological systems, from the development of economic markets to scientific and technological progress to biological evolution. They have been widely discussed,…
The emergence of "big data" offers unprecedented opportunities for not only accelerating scientific advances but also enabling new modes of discovery. Scientific progress in many disciplines is increasingly enabled by our ability to examine…
The web does not only enable new forms of science, it also creates new possibilities to study science and new digital scholarship. This paper brings together multiple perspectives: from individual researchers seeking the best options to…
Due to the significant role that curiosity plays in our lives, several theoretical constructs, such as the information gap theory and compression progress theory, have sought to explain how we engage in its practice. According to the…
How should we gather information in a network, where each node's visibility is limited to its local neighborhood? This problem arises in numerous real-world applications, such as surveying and task routing in social networks, team formation…
To survive in dynamic and uncertain environments, individuals must develop effective decision strategies that balance information gathering and decision commitment. Models of such strategies often prioritize either optimizing tangible…
Using time series of US patents per million inhabitants, knowledge-generating cycles can be distinguished. These cycles partly coincide with Kondratieff long waves. The changes in the slopes between them indicate discontinuities in the…
The selection of research topics by scientists can be viewed as an exploration process conducted by individuals with cognitive limitations traversing a complex cognitive landscape influenced by both individual and social factors. While…