When does cyclic dominance lead to stable spiral waves?

Species diversity in ecosystems is often accompanied by characteristic spatio-temporal patterns. Here, we consider a generic two-dimensional population model and study the spiraling patterns arising from the combined effects of cyclic dominance of three species, mutation, pair-exchange and individual hopping. The dynamics is characterized by nonlinear mobility and a Hopf bifurcation around which the system's four-phase state diagram is inferred from a complex Ginzburg-Landau equation derived using a perturbative multiscale expansion. While the dynamics is generally characterized by spiraling patterns, we show that spiral waves are stable in only one of the four phases. Furthermore, we characterize a phase where nonlinearity leads to the annihilation of spirals and to the spatially uniform dominance of each species in turn. Away from the Hopf bifurcation, when the coexistence fixed point is unstable, the spiraling patterns are also affected by the nonlinear diffusion

An analytical framework to nowcast well-being using mobile phone data

An intriguing open question is whether measurements made on Big Data recording human activities can yield us high-fidelity proxies of socio-economic development and well-being. Can we monitor and predict the socio-economic development of a territory just by observing the behavior of its inhabitants through the lens of Big Data? In this paper, we design a data-driven analytical framework that uses mobility measures and social measures extracted from mobile phone data to estimate indicators for socio-economic development and well-being. We discover that the diversity of mobility, defined in terms of entropy of the individual users' trajectories, exhibits (i) significant correlation with two different socio-economic indicators and (ii) the highest importance in predictive models built to predict the socio-economic indicators. Our analytical framework opens an interesting perspective to study human behavior through the lens of Big Data by means of new statistical indicators that quantify and possibly "nowcast" the well-being and the socio-economic development of a territory

Evolution of a field: Swiss media and communication studies

In this paper, we present the evolution of Swiss Media and Communication Studies over the last decade by summarizing the main results from a project funded by the Swiss University Conference (2008–2017). We give an overall picture of the growth in the field (in terms of student numbers, resources and activities), look at diversity in terms of topics (two clusters are identified and presented with respect to various indicators), present changes at the level of individual research units (where we find variance in terms of evolution), give insights into publication patterns (two different publication cultures are found) and describe mobility and career pathways in the field. We observe limited mobility within Switzerland, internal pathways at the level of doctoral students and post-docs, and international mobility, mainly within the same linguistic region, at the professorial level. We conclude that the field has reached a consolidation phase and achieved a rather stable situation, but faces new challenges, with digitalization and the pressure towards homogenization in publication output among the most important