Related papers: Democratic Resilience and Sociotechnical Shocks
We introduce a general contagion-like model for competing opinions that includes dynamic resistance to alternative opinions. We show that this model can describe candidate vote distributions, spatial vote correlations, and a slow approach…
The dynamics of political opinion are a critical component of modern society with large-scale implications for the evolution of intra- and international political discourse and policy. Here we utilize recent high-resolution survey data to…
The purpose of this research paper is to critically explore the impact of state and state-sponsored actors on the cyber environment and the future of critical infrastructure, the majority of these attacks on the cyber environment have…
Individual contributions to the spread of an epidemic vary widely due to an individual's location in a social network and their intrinsic ability to spread or contract diseases. While the effect of heterogeneous population structure and…
Affective polarization, or, inter-party hostility, is increasingly recognized as a pervasive issue in democracies worldwide, posing a threat to social cohesion. The digital media ecosystem, now widely accessible and ever-present, has often…
This article proposes a fundamental methodological shift in the modelling of policy interventions for sustainability transitions in order to account for complexity (e.g. self-reinforcing mechanism arising from multi-agent interactions) and…
Critical Infrastructures (CIs), such as smart power grids, transport systems, and financial infrastructures, are more and more vulnerable to cyber threats, due to the adoption of commodity computing facilities. Despite the use of several…
Understanding and characterizing the vulnerability of urban infrastructures, which refers to the engineering facilities essential for the regular running of cities and that exist naturally in the form of networks, is of great value to us.…
The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by an infodemic of misinformation that impedes effective public health responses. This study examines relationships between socioeconomic factors and infodemic risk patterns across 37 OECD…
Despite global connectivity, societies seem to be increasingly polarized and fragmented. This phenomenon is rooted in the underlying complex structure and dynamics of social systems. Far from homogeneously mixing or adopting conforming…
Election polls play a critical role in political discussions by probing public opinion and enabling political parties to assess their performance before elections. However, traditional polling methods sometimes fail to predict election…
The flourishing of fake news is favored by recommendation algorithms of online social networks which, based on previous users activity, provide content adapted to their preferences and so create filter bubbles. We introduce an analytically…
Liquid democracy is the principle of making collective decisions by letting agents transitively delegate their votes. Despite its significant appeal, it has become apparent that a weakness of liquid democracy is that a small subset of…
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has been playing a pivotal role since the last decade in developing countries that brings citizen services to the doorsteps and connecting people. With this aspiration ICT has introduced…
In societal-scale decision-making systems the collective is faced with the problem of ensuring that the derived group decision is in accord with the collective's intention. In modern systems, political institutions have instatiated…
Political campaigns are among the most sophisticated marketing exercises in the United States. As part of their marketing communication strategy, an increasing number of politicians adopt social media to inform their constituencies. This…
The growing integration of AI into cybersecurity is reshaping the balance between attackers and defenders. When access to advanced AI-enabled defence tools is uneven, resource-limited defenders may be unable to adopt effective protection,…
Networked multi-agent dynamical systems have been used to model how individual opinions evolve over time due to the opinions of other agents in the network. Particularly, such a model has been used to study how a planning agent can be used…
Online political microtargeting involves monitoring people's online behaviour, and using the collected data, sometimes enriched with other data, to show people-targeted political advertisements. Online political microtargeting is widely…
Social media have quickly become a prevalent channel to access information, spread ideas, and influence opinions. However, it has been suggested that social and algorithmic filtering may cause exposure to less diverse points of view, and…