Related papers: How We Ruined The Internet
Modern science increasingly relies on ever-growing observational datasets and automated inference pipelines, under the implicit belief that accumulating more data makes scientific conclusions more reliable. Here we show that this belief can…
The technological revolution of the Internet has digitized the social, economic, political, and cultural activities of billions of humans. While researchers have been paying due attention to concerns of misinformation and bias, these…
Research in cybersecurity may seem reactive, specific, ephemeral, and indeed ineffective. Despite decades of innovation in defense, even the most critical software systems turn out to be vulnerable to attacks. Time and again. Offense and…
We report our initial investigations into reliability and path-finding based models and propose future areas of interest. Inspired by broken sidewalks during on-campus construction projects, we develop two models for navigating this…
In this study, we explore the inherent trade-off between accuracy and robustness in neural networks, drawing an analogy to the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics. We propose that neural networks are subject to an uncertainty…
Fads, product adoption, mobs, rumors, memes, and emergent norms are diverse social contagions that have been modeled as network cascades. Empirical study of these cascades is vulnerable to what we describe as the "opacity problem": the…
Routing strives to connect all the Internet, but compete: political pressure threatens routing fragmentation; architectural changes such as private clouds, carrier-grade NAT, and firewalls make connectivity conditional; and commercial…
Usability engineering is situated in a much larger social and institutional context than is usually acknowledged by usability professionals in the way that they define their field. The definitions and processes used in the improvement of…
Robustness is one of the key properties of nowadays networks. However, robustness cannot be simply enforced by design or regulation since many important networks, most prominently the Internet, are not created and controlled by a central…
User connectivity patterns in network applications are known to be heterogeneous, and to follow periodic (daily and weekly) patterns. In many cases, the regularity and the correlation of those patterns is problematic: for network…
Resilience of cyber-physical networks to unexpected failures is a critical need widely recognized across domains. For instance, power grids, telecommunication networks, transportation infrastructures and water treatment systems have all…
A crucial challenge in network theory is the study of the robustness of a network after facing a sequence of failures. In this work, we propose a dynamical definition of network's robustness based on Information Theory, that considers…
Integrated information theory (IIT) starts from consciousness itself and identifies a set of properties (axioms) that are true of every conceivable experience. The axioms are translated into a set of postulates about the substrate of…
While the Internet was conceived as a decentralized network, the most widely used web applications today tend toward centralization. Control increasingly rests with centralized service providers who, as a consequence, have also amassed…
Infrastructures are not inherently durable or fragile, yet all are fragile over the long term. Durability requires care and maintenance of individual components and the links between them. Astronomy is an ideal domain in which to study…
Peer to peer systems are the networks consisting of a group of nodes possible to be as wide as the Internet. These networks are required of evaluation mechanisms and distributed control and configurations, so each peer will be able to…
Machine learning researchers and practitioners steadily enlarge the multitude of successful learning models. They achieve this through in-depth theoretical analyses and experiential heuristics. However, there is no known general-purpose…
The explosive development of "free" or "open source" information goods contravenes the conventional wisdom that markets and commercial organizations are necessary to efficiently supply products. This paper proposes a theoretical explanation…
Cognitive biases are often attributed to heuristics or limited information. Yet the structure of social networks is a key, often-overlooked source of perceptual bias. When information passes through social connections, the network alone can…
Through systematic empirical investigation, we uncover a fundamental and concerning property of Large Language Models: while they can safely learn facts that don't contradict their knowledge, attempting to update facts with contradictory…