Related papers: Modeling Social Systems: Transparency, Reproducibi…
Designing sustainable systems involves complex interactions between environmental resources, social impact/adoption, and financial costs/benefits. In a constrained world, achieving a balanced design across those dimensions has become…
Accountability is an often called for property of technical systems. It is a requirement for algorithmic decision systems, autonomous cyber-physical systems, and for software systems in general. As a concept, accountability goes back to the…
We argue that complex models with many parameters do not allow to infer about cause and effect.
Mathematical models are increasingly a part of microbiological research. Here, we share our perspective on how modeling advances the discipline by: (i) enforcing logical consistency, (ii) enabling quantitative prediction, (iii) extracting…
Results of simulation studies evaluating the performance of statistical methods are often considered actionable and thus can have a major impact on the way empirical research is implemented. However, so far there is limited evidence about…
Big Data dealing with the social produce predictive correlations for the benefit of brands and web platforms. Beyond "society" and "opinion" for which the text lays out a genealogy, appear the "traces" that must be theorized as…
Within the framework of the ViSE (Voting in a Stochastic Environment) model, we examine the dynamics in a society, part of which can be considered an elite. The model allows us to analyze the influence of social attitudes, such as…
Socio-diversity, the variety of human opinions, ideas, behaviors and styles, has profound implications for social systems. While it fuels innovation, productivity, and collective intelligence, it can also complicate communication and erode…
Individual choices often depend on the order in which the decisions are made. In this paper, we expose a general theory of measurable systems (an example of which is an individual's preferences) allowing for incompatible (non-commuting)…
Identifying and understanding modular organizations is centrally important in the study of complex systems. Several approaches to this problem have been advanced, many framed in information-theoretic terms. Our treatment starts from the…
Cooperation is central to the success of human societies as it is crucial for overcoming some of the most pressing social challenges of our time. Yet how human cooperation is achieved and may persist is still a main puzzle in the social and…
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…
What do societies, the Internet, and the human brain have in common? They are all examples of complex relational systems, whose emerging behaviours are largely determined by the non-trivial networks of interactions among their constituents,…
We attempt to take a comprehensive look at the challenges of representing the spatio-temporal structures and dynamic processes defining a city's overall characteristics. For the task of urban planning and urban operation, we take the stance…
Machine learning systems have become popular in fields such as marketing, financing, or data mining. While they are highly accurate, complex machine learning systems pose challenges for engineers and users. Their inherent complexity makes…
Reproducibility is inseparable from transparency, as sharing data, code and computational environment is a pre-requisite for being able to retrace the steps of producing the research results. Others have made the case that this artifact…
Through case studies, we demonstrate how multiverse analysis can strengthen the robustness and transparency of computational social science findings against alternative methodological decisions. We conduct multiverse analyses of three…
Social norms and conventions are commonly accepted and adopted behaviors and practices within a social group that guide interactions -- e.g., how to spell a word or how to greet people -- and are central to a group's culture and identity.…
Promoting and increasing energy efficiency is a promising method of reducing CO2 emissions and avoiding the potentially devastating effects of climate change. The question is: How do we induce a cultural or behavioural change whereby people…
Trust and reputation models for distributed, collaborative systems have been studied and applied in several domains, in order to stimulate cooperation while preventing selfish and malicious behaviors. Nonetheless, such models have received…