Related papers: Heterogeneity extends criticality
We further study the interfaces arising in a situation of inhomogeneity. More precisely, we identify a characteristic length for the gradient percolation model, that enables us to tighten previous estimates established for it. This allows…
Biological systems, unlike physical or chemical systems, are characterized by the very inhomogeneous distribution of their components. The immune system, in particular, is notable for self-organizing its structure. Classically, the dynamics…
Classic economic science is reaching the limits of its explanatory powers. Complexity science uses an increasingly larger set of different methods to analyze physical, biological, cultural, social, and economic factors, providing a broader…
One of the famous results of network science states that networks with heterogeneous connectivity are more susceptible to epidemic spreading than their more homogeneous counterparts. In particular, in networks of identical nodes it has been…
In the context of a homogeneous universe, we note that the appearance of aggressively expanding advanced life is geometrically similar to the process of nucleation and bubble growth in a first-order cosmological phase transition. We exploit…
The perceived risk and reward for a given situation can vary depending on resource availability, accumulated wealth, and other extrinsic factors such as individual backgrounds. Based on this general aspect of everyday life, here we use…
Nowadays, software artifacts are ubiquitous in our lives being an essential part of home appliances, cars, cell phones, and even in more critical activities like aeronautics and health sciences. In this context software failures may produce…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…
The diversity of patterns that emerge from complex systems motivates their use for scientific or artistic purposes. When exploring these systems, the challenges faced are the size of the parameter space and the strongly non-linear mapping…
Robustness is often regarded as a critical future challenge for real-world applications, where stability is essential. However, as models often learn tasks in a similar order, we hypothesize that easier tasks will be easier regardless of…
One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…
Prediction of events is the challenge in many different disciplines, from meteorology to finance; the more this task is difficult, the more a system is {\it complex}. Nevertheless, even according to this restricted definition, a general…
Aging is a fundamental aspect of living systems that undergo a progressive deterioration of physiological function with age and an increase of vulnerability to disease and death. Living systems, known as complex systems, require complexity…
Many data sets contain an inherent multilevel structure, for example, because of repeated measurements of the same observational units. Taking this structure into account is critical for the accuracy and calibration of any statistical…
We identify a new universality class of phase transitions that emerges in non-normal systems, extending the classical framework beyond eigenvalue instabilities. Unlike traditional critical phenomena, where transitions occur when eigenvalues…
Most of the DNA that composes a complex organism is non-coding and defined as junk. Even the coding part is composed of genes that affect the phenotype differently. Therefore, a random mutation has an effect on the specimen fitness that…
A consistent theme in software experimentation at Microsoft has been solving problems of experimentation at scale for a diverse set of products. Running experiments at scale (i.e., many experiments on many users) has become state of the art…
The world is changing at an ever-increasing pace. And it has changed in a much more fundamental way than one would think, primarily because it has become more connected and interdependent than in our entire history. Every new product, every…
When a second-order phase transition is crossed at fine rate, the evolution of the system stops being adiabatic as a result of the critical slowing down in the neighborhood of the critical point. In systems with a topologically nontrivial…
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…