Related papers: Critical fragility in socio-technical systems

Influence maximization has found applications in a wide range of real-world problems, for instance, viral marketing of products in an online social network, and information propagation of valuable information such as job vacancy…

Physical systems experience nonlinear disturbances which have the potential to disrupt desired behavior. For a particular disturbance, whether or not the system recovers from the disturbance to a desired stable equilibrium point depends on…

Critical infrastructures form a technological skeleton of our world by providing us with water, food, electricity, gas, transportation, communication, banking, and finance. Moreover, as urban population increases, the role of…

Critical observability is a property of cyber-physical systems to detect whether the current state belongs to a set of critical states. In safety-critical applications, critical states model operations that may be unsafe or of a particular…

It has long been hypothesized that operating close to the critical state is beneficial for natural, artificial and their evolutionary systems. We put this hypothesis to test in a system of evolving foraging agents controlled by neural…

The worldwide healthcare organizations are facing a number of daunting challenges forcing systems to benefit from modern technologies and telecom capabilities. Hence, systems evolution through extension of the existing information…

Many critical infrastructure systems have network structure and are under stress. Despite their national importance, the complexity of large-scale transport networks means we do not fully understand their vulnerabilities to cascade…

Global environmental change is pushing many socio-environmental systems towards critical thresholds, where ecological systems' states are on the precipice of tipping points and interventions are needed to navigate or avert impending…

Collective behaviors exhibited by animal groups, such as fish schools, bird flocks, or insect swarms are fascinating examples of self-organization in biology. Concepts and methods from statistical physics have been used to argue…

In order to investigate the protection of human self-determination within algorithmic sociotechnical systems, we study the relationships between the concepts of mutability, bias, feedback loops, and power dynamics. We focus on the…

Temporal networks are a class of time-varying networks, which change their topology according to a given time-ordered sequence of static networks (known as subsystems). This paper investigates the reachability and controllability of…

Technology development practices in industry are often primarily focused on business results, which risks creating unbalanced power relations between corporate interests and the needs or concerns of people who are affected by technology…

According to the criticality hypothesis, collective biological systems should operate in a special parameter region, close to so-called critical points, where the collective behavior undergoes a qualitative change between different…

The explosion in the use of software in important sociotechnical systems has renewed focus on the study of the way technical constructs reflect policies, norms, and human values. This effort requires the engagement of scholars and…

We present a general conceptual framework for self-organized criticality (SOC), based on the recognition that it is nothing but the expression, ''unfolded'' in a suitable parameter space, of an underlying {\em unstable} dynamical critical…

In recent years, the increase in the usage and efficiency of Artificial Intelligence and, more in general, of Automated Decision-Making systems has brought with it an increasing and welcome awareness of the risks associated with such…

We address a fundamental problem that is systematically encountered when modeling complex systems: the limitedness of the information available. In the case of economic and financial networks, privacy issues severely limit the information…

Here we introduce the idea of using rational expectations, a core concept in economics and finance, as a tool to predict the optimal failure time for a wide class of weighted k-out-of-n reliability systems. We illustrate the concept by…

In this paper, we study the robustness of safety properties of a linear dynamical system with respect to model uncertainties. Our paper involves three parts. In the first part, we provide symbolic (analytical) and numerical (representation…

There are both technical and social issues regarding the design of sustainable scientific software. Scientists want continuously evolving systems that capture the most recent knowledge while developers and architects want sufficiently…