23,740 research outputs found
Effectiveness of dismantling strategies on moderated vs. unmoderated online social platforms
Online social networks are the perfect test bed to better understand
large-scale human behavior in interacting contexts. Although they are broadly
used and studied, little is known about how their terms of service and posting
rules affect the way users interact and information spreads. Acknowledging the
relation between network connectivity and functionality, we compare the
robustness of two different online social platforms, Twitter and Gab, with
respect to dismantling strategies based on the recursive censor of users
characterized by social prominence (degree) or intensity of inflammatory
content (sentiment). We find that the moderated (Twitter) vs unmoderated (Gab)
character of the network is not a discriminating factor for intervention
effectiveness. We find, however, that more complex strategies based upon the
combination of topological and content features may be effective for network
dismantling. Our results provide useful indications to design better strategies
for countervailing the production and dissemination of anti-social content in
online social platforms
Mathematics Is Physics
In this essay, I argue that mathematics is a natural science---just like
physics, chemistry, or biology---and that this can explain the alleged
"unreasonable" effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences. The main
challenge for this view is to explain how mathematical theories can become
increasingly abstract and develop their own internal structure, whilst still
maintaining an appropriate empirical tether that can explain their later use in
physics. In order to address this, I offer a theory of mathematical
theory-building based on the idea that human knowledge has the structure of a
scale-free network and that abstract mathematical theories arise from a
repeated process of replacing strong analogies with new hubs in this network.
This allows mathematics to be seen as the study of regularities, within
regularities, within ..., within regularities of the natural world. Since
mathematical theories are derived from the natural world, albeit at a much
higher level of abstraction than most other scientific theories, it should come
as no surprise that they so often show up in physics.
This version of the essay contains an addendum responding to Slyvia
Wenmackers' essay and comments that were made on the FQXi website.Comment: 15 pages, LaTeX. Second prize winner in 2015 FQXi Essay Contest (see
http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2364
Knowledge is at the Edge! How to Search in Distributed Machine Learning Models
With the advent of the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 an enormous amount
of data is produced at the edge of the network. Due to a lack of computing
power, this data is currently send to the cloud where centralized machine
learning models are trained to derive higher level knowledge. With the recent
development of specialized machine learning hardware for mobile devices, a new
era of distributed learning is about to begin that raises a new research
question: How can we search in distributed machine learning models? Machine
learning at the edge of the network has many benefits, such as low-latency
inference and increased privacy. Such distributed machine learning models can
also learn personalized for a human user, a specific context, or application
scenario. As training data stays on the devices, control over possibly
sensitive data is preserved as it is not shared with a third party. This new
form of distributed learning leads to the partitioning of knowledge between
many devices which makes access difficult. In this paper we tackle the problem
of finding specific knowledge by forwarding a search request (query) to a
device that can answer it best. To that end, we use a entropy based quality
metric that takes the context of a query and the learning quality of a device
into account. We show that our forwarding strategy can achieve over 95%
accuracy in a urban mobility scenario where we use data from 30 000 people
commuting in the city of Trento, Italy.Comment: Published in CoopIS 201
Wikipedias: Collaborative web-based encyclopedias as complex networks
Wikipedia is a popular web-based encyclopedia edited freely and
collaboratively by its users. In this paper we present an analysis of
Wikipedias in several languages as complex networks. The hyperlinks pointing
from one Wikipedia article to another are treated as directed links while the
articles represent the nodes of the network. We show that many network
characteristics are common to different language versions of Wikipedia, such as
their degree distributions, growth, topology, reciprocity, clustering,
assortativity, path lengths and triad significance profiles. These
regularities, found in the ensemble of Wikipedias in different languages and of
different sizes, point to the existence of a unique growth process. We also
compare Wikipedias to other previously studied networks.Comment: v3: 9 pages, 12 figures, Change of title, few paragraphs and two
figures. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.
An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form
How well can designers communicate qualities of touch?
This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makersâ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designersâ capabilities
Co-authorship networks in Swiss political research
Co-authorship is an important indicator of scientific collaboration. Co-authorship networks are composed of sub-communities, and researchers can gain visibility by connecting these insulated subgroups. This article presents a comprehensive co-authorship network analysis of Swiss political science. Three levels are addressed: disciplinary cohesion and structure at large, communities, and the integrative capacity of individual researchers. The results suggest that collaboration exists across geographical and language borders even though different regions focus on complementary publication strategies. The subfield of public policy and administration has the highest integrative capacity. Co-authorship is a function of several factors, most importantly being in the same subfield. At the individual level, the analysis identifies researchers who belong to the âinner circleâ of Swiss political science and who link different communities. In contrast to previous research, the analysis is based on the full set of publications of all political researchers employed in Switzerland in 2013, including past publications
Let Your CyberAlter Ego Share Information and Manage Spam
Almost all of us have multiple cyberspace identities, and these {\em
cyber}alter egos are networked together to form a vast cyberspace social
network. This network is distinct from the world-wide-web (WWW), which is being
queried and mined to the tune of billions of dollars everyday, and until
recently, has gone largely unexplored. Empirically, the cyberspace social
networks have been found to possess many of the same complex features that
characterize its real counterparts, including scale-free degree distributions,
low diameter, and extensive connectivity. We show that these topological
features make the latent networks particularly suitable for explorations and
management via local-only messaging protocols. {\em Cyber}alter egos can
communicate via their direct links (i.e., using only their own address books)
and set up a highly decentralized and scalable message passing network that can
allow large-scale sharing of information and data. As one particular example of
such collaborative systems, we provide a design of a spam filtering system, and
our large-scale simulations show that the system achieves a spam detection rate
close to 100%, while the false positive rate is kept around zero. This system
has several advantages over other recent proposals (i) It uses an already
existing network, created by the same social dynamics that govern our daily
lives, and no dedicated peer-to-peer (P2P) systems or centralized server-based
systems need be constructed; (ii) It utilizes a percolation search algorithm
that makes the query-generated traffic scalable; (iii) The network has a built
in trust system (just as in social networks) that can be used to thwart
malicious attacks; iv) It can be implemented right now as a plugin to popular
email programs, such as MS Outlook, Eudora, and Sendmail.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figure
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