Identifying trends and flows in Communication and Information Processing by means of keyword network analysis

The purpose of this paper is to identify influential themes and knowledge flows in the area of communications and information processing and suggest trends that are likely to make (or continue making) an impact. We applied keyword network analysis on articles whose keywords match the themes of the International Conference on Communication and Information Processing, collected through the Thompson Reuters’ Web of Science and studied the articles’ thematic interconnections and their dynamics. The keyword network was found to be clustered around the themes cloud, data, mobile, security, semantic and social. Security and embeddedness are found to be the most dominant topics, common to all groups. Design and performance are key influencers of thematic flows and data mining/analysis are close to all nodes/keywords and therefore most popular. Big data, data fusion/integration and e-government are themes identified as potentially strong future influencers

OSINT as a part of cyber defense system

The paper presents the results of research on the development of fundamental and applied principles for analyzing information flows in global computer networks while conducting open source intelligence (OSINT). The relevance of this task, in particular, concerning the provision of cyber security, the parameters of the modern information space, the existing theoretical and technological solutions are substantiated. The description of methodological and instrumental means of analysis and modeling of information flows, distributed content monitoring of global networks, the creation of multilingual full-text databases, analysis of the dynamics of thematic information flows with the use of nonlinear analysis, automatic formation of models of subject areas in the field of cyber security are presented

High quality topic extraction from business news explains abnormal financial market volatility

Understanding the mutual relationships between information flows and social activity in society today is one of the cornerstones of the social sciences. In financial economics, the key issue in this regard is understanding and quantifying how news of all possible types (geopolitical, environmental, social, financial, economic, etc.) affect trading and the pricing of firms in organized stock markets. In this article, we seek to address this issue by performing an analysis of more than 24 million news records provided by Thompson Reuters and of their relationship with trading activity for 206 major stocks in the S&P US stock index. We show that the whole landscape of news that affect stock price movements can be automatically summarized via simple regularized regressions between trading activity and news information pieces decomposed, with the help of simple topic modeling techniques, into their "thematic" features. Using these methods, we are able to estimate and quantify the impacts of news on trading. We introduce network-based visualization techniques to represent the whole landscape of news information associated with a basket of stocks. The examination of the words that are representative of the topic distributions confirms that our method is able to extract the significant pieces of information influencing the stock market. Our results show that one of the most puzzling stylized fact in financial economies, namely that at certain times trading volumes appear to be "abnormally large," can be partially explained by the flow of news. In this sense, our results prove that there is no "excess trading," when restricting to times when news are genuinely novel and provide relevant financial information.Comment: The previous version of this article included an error. This is a revised versio

Applications of system dynamics modelling to computer music

Based on a composer's psycho-acoustic imagination or response to music, system dynamics modelling and simulation tools can be used as a scoring device to map the structural dynamic shape of interest of computer music compositions. The tools can also be used as a generator of compositional ideas reflecting thematic juxtaposition and emotional flux in musical narratives. These techniques allow the modelling of everyday narratives to provide a structural/metaphorical means of music composition based on archetypes that are shared with wider audiences. The methods are outlined using two examples

Bridging Organizational Silos

{Excerpt} A silo is a tall, self-contained cylindrical structure that isused to store commodities such as grain after a harvest. It is also a figure of speech for organizational entities—and their management teams—that lack the desire or motivation to coordinate (at worst, even communicate) with other entities in the same organization. Wide recognition of the metaphor intimates that structural barriers in sizable organizations often cause units to work against one another: silos, politics, and turf wars are often mentioned in the same breath. An organization is a social arrangement to pursue a collective intent. Coordination, and the requisite communication it implies, is fundamental to organizational performance toward that. Yet, many organizations grapple with the challenge of connecting the subsystems they have devised to enhance specific contributing functions. Here and there, organizational, spatial, and social boundaries impede—when they do not block—the flows of knowledge needed to make full use of capabilities. High costs are borne from duplication of effort, inconsistencies, and inefficiencies. Everywhere, large organizations must move from managing silos to managing systems