Related papers: Modeling revolutions in networked societies: learn…
The self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2011 in the small Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid, set off a sequence of events culminating in the revolutions of the Arab Spring. It is widely believed that the Internet and social media…
The recent social unrest across the Middle East and North Africa has deposed dictators who had ruled for decades. While the events have been hailed as an "Arab Spring" by those who hope that repressive autocracies will be replaced by…
There is little doubt about whether social networks play a role in modern protests. This agreement has triggered an entire research avenue, in which social structure and content analysis have been central --but are typically exploited…
Models of cooperation grounded on social networks and on the ability of individuals to choose actions and partners aim to describe human social behavior. Extensive computer simulations of these models give important insight in the social…
An important challenge in several disciplines is to understand how sudden changes can propagate among coupled systems. Examples include the synchronization of business cycles, population collapse in patchy ecosystems, markets shifting to a…
By means of extensive computer simulations, the authors consider the entangled coevolution of actions and social structure in a new version of a spatial Prisoner's Dilemma model that naturally gives way to a process of social…
I present a unified discussion of several recently published results concerning the escalation, timing and severity of violent events in human conflicts and global terrorism, and set them in the wider context of real-world and cyber-based…
In recent years, several global events have severely disrupted economies and social structures, undermining confidence in the resilience of modern societies. While empirical evidence on the dynamics and drivers of past societal collapse is…
The recent wave of mobilizations in the Arab world and across Western countries has generated much discussion on how digital media is connected to the diffusion of protests. We examine that connection using data from the surge of…
In human societies, people's willingness to compete and strive for better social status as well as being envious of those perceived in some way superior lead to social structures that are intrinsically hierarchical. Here we propose an…
Protest is ubiquitous in the 21st Century and the people who participate in such movements do so because they seek to bring about social change. However, social change takes time and involves repeated interactions between individual…
Mechanisms of pattern formation---of which the Turing instability is an archetype---constitute an important class of dynamical processes occurring in biological, ecological and chemical systems. Recently, it has been shown that the Turing…
The ability to understand and eventually predict the emergence of information and activation cascades in social networks is core to complex socio-technical systems research. However, the complexity of social interactions makes this a…
Aggregated phenomena in social sciences and economics are highly dependent on the way individuals interact. To help understanding the interplay between socio-economic activities and underlying social networks, this paper studies a…
Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain the spontaneous generation of self-organized patterns, hypothesised to play a role in the formation of many of the magnificent patterns observed in Nature. In several cases of interest, the…
Recent years have seen a marked increase in the spread of misinformation, a phenomenon which has been accelerated and amplified by social media such as Facebook and Twitter. While some actors spread misinformation to push a specific agenda,…
Social networks have provided a platform for the effective exchange of ideas or opinions but also served as a hotbed of polarization. While much research attempts to explore different causes of opinion polarization, the effect of perception…
Over the past decade network theory has turned out to be a powerful methodology to investigate complex systems of various sorts. Through data analysis, modeling, and simulation quite an unparalleled insight into their structure, function,…
Social media is transforming various aspects of offline life, from everyday decisions such as dining choices to the progression of conflicts. In this study, we propose a coupled modelling framework with an online social network layer to…
This paper is concerned with a family of Reaction-Diffusion systems that we introduced in [15], and that generalizes the SIR type models from epidemiology. Such systems are now also used to describe collective behaviors.In this paper, we…