Related papers: Democratic Resilience and Sociotechnical Shocks
Complex networks are ubiquitous: a cell, the human brain, a group of people and the Internet are all examples of interconnected many-body systems characterized by macroscopic properties that cannot be trivially deduced from those of their…
Public sector agencies perform the critical task of implementing the redistributive role of the State by acting as the leading provider of critical public services that many rely on. In recent years, public agencies have been increasingly…
The present study argues that political communication on social media is mediated by a platform's digital architecture, defined as the technical protocols that enable, constrain, and shape user behavior in a virtual space. A framework for…
The 2004 US Presidential Election cycle marked the debut of Internet-based media such as blogs and social networking websites as institutionally recognized features of the American political landscape. Using a longitudinal sample of all…
Research on digital degrowth predominantly critiques digital expansion or presents alternative digital practices. Yet, analyzing the link between digital technologies and complexity is crucial to overcome systemic obstacles hindering…
The detection of online cyberbullying has seen an increase in societal importance, popularity in research, and available open data. Nevertheless, while computational power and affordability of resources continue to increase, the access…
Modern grid monitoring equipment enables utilities to collect detailed records of power interruptions. These data are aggregated to compute publicly reported metrics describing high-level characteristics of grid performance. The current…
Liquid democracy is a system that combines aspects of direct democracy and representative democracy by allowing voters to either vote directly themselves, or delegate their votes to others. In this paper we study the information aggregation…
Institutions and investors are constantly faced with the challenge of appropriately distributing endowments. No budget is limitless and optimising overall spending without sacrificing positive outcomes has been approached and resolved using…
Both parasites in biological systems and adversarial forces in cybersecurity are often perceived as threats: disruptive elements that must be eliminated. However, these entities play a critical role in revealing systemic weaknesses, driving…
Equipping current decision-making tools with notions of fairness, equitability, or other ethically motivated outcomes, is one of the top priorities in recent research efforts in machine learning, AI, and optimization. In this paper, we…
Collectives form non-equilibrium social structures characterised by a volatile dynamics. Individuals join or leave. Social relations change quickly. Therefore, differently from engineered or ecological systems, a resilient reference state…
The explosive growth of social media has not only revolutionized communication but also brought challenges such as political polarization, misinformation, hate speech, and echo chambers. This dissertation employs computational social…
Most models of complex systems have been homogeneous, i.e., all elements have the same properties (spatial, temporal, structural, functional). However, most natural systems are heterogeneous: few elements are more relevant, larger,…
Online reviews and recommendation systems help users navigate overwhelming choice, but they are vulnerable to self-reinforcing distortions. This paper examines how a single malicious reviewer can exploit popularity-biased rating dynamics…
The threshold model has been widely adopted as a classic model for studying contagion processes on social networks. We consider asymmetric individual interactions in social networks and introduce a persuasion mechanism into the threshold…
The heterogeneity of the influence processes is an important feature of social systems: how we perceive social influence and how we influence other individuals is heavily influenced by our opinion and non-opinion attributes. The latter…
We present a simple model of the emergence of the division of labor and the development of a system of resource subsidy from an agent-based model of directed resource production with variable degrees of trust between the agents. The model…
An alternative voting scheme is proposed to fill the democratic gap between a president elected democratically via universal suffrage (deterministic outcome, the actual majority decides), and a president elected by one person randomly…
One of the hallmarks of a free and fair society is the ability to conduct a peaceful and seamless transfer of power from one leader to another. Democratically, this is measured in a citizen population's trust in the electoral system of…