40,953 research outputs found
A Comparison of Spatial-based Targeted Disease Containment Strategies using Mobile Phone Data
Epidemic outbreaks are an important healthcare challenge, especially in
developing countries where they represent one of the major causes of mortality.
Approaches that can rapidly target subpopulations for surveillance and control
are critical for enhancing containment processes during epidemics.
Using a real-world dataset from Ivory Coast, this work presents an attempt to
unveil the socio-geographical heterogeneity of disease transmission dynamics.
By employing a spatially explicit meta-population epidemic model derived from
mobile phone Call Detail Records (CDRs), we investigate how the differences in
mobility patterns may affect the course of a realistic infectious disease
outbreak. We consider different existing measures of the spatial dimension of
human mobility and interactions, and we analyse their relevance in identifying
the highest risk sub-population of individuals, as the best candidates for
isolation countermeasures. The approaches presented in this paper provide
further evidence that mobile phone data can be effectively exploited to
facilitate our understanding of individuals' spatial behaviour and its
relationship with the risk of infectious diseases' contagion. In particular, we
show that CDRs-based indicators of individuals' spatial activities and
interactions hold promise for gaining insight of contagion heterogeneity and
thus for developing containment strategies to support decision-making during
country-level pandemics
A framework for the local information dynamics of distributed computation in complex systems
The nature of distributed computation has often been described in terms of
the component operations of universal computation: information storage,
transfer and modification. We review the first complete framework that
quantifies each of these individual information dynamics on a local scale
within a system, and describes the manner in which they interact to create
non-trivial computation where "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts".
We describe the application of the framework to cellular automata, a simple yet
powerful model of distributed computation. This is an important application,
because the framework is the first to provide quantitative evidence for several
important conjectures about distributed computation in cellular automata: that
blinkers embody information storage, particles are information transfer agents,
and particle collisions are information modification events. The framework is
also shown to contrast the computations conducted by several well-known
cellular automata, highlighting the importance of information coherence in
complex computation. The results reviewed here provide important quantitative
insights into the fundamental nature of distributed computation and the
dynamics of complex systems, as well as impetus for the framework to be applied
to the analysis and design of other systems.Comment: 44 pages, 8 figure
Modeling the Heart as a Communication System
Electrical communication between cardiomyocytes can be perturbed during
arrhythmia, but these perturbations are not captured by conventional
electrocardiographic metrics. We developed a theoretical framework to quantify
electrical communication using information theory metrics in 2-dimensional cell
lattice models of cardiac excitation propagation. The time series generated by
each cell was coarse-grained to 1 when excited or 0 when resting. The Shannon
entropy for each cell was calculated from the time series during four
clinically important heart rhythms: normal heartbeat, anatomical reentry,
spiral reentry, and multiple reentry. We also used mutual information to
perform spatial profiling of communication during these cardiac arrhythmias. We
found that information sharing between cells was spatially heterogeneous. In
addition, cardiac arrhythmia significantly impacted information sharing within
the heart. Entropy localized the path of the drifting core of spiral reentry,
which could be an optimal target of therapeutic ablation. We conclude that
information theory metrics can quantitatively assess electrical communication
among cardiomyocytes. The traditional concept of the heart as a functional
syncytium sharing electrical information cannot predict altered entropy and
information sharing during complex arrhythmia. Information theory metrics may
find clinical application in the identification of rhythm-specific treatments
which are currently unmet by traditional electrocardiographic techniques.Comment: 26 pages (including Appendix), 6 figures, 8 videos (not uploaded due
to size limitation
Disordered proteins and network disorder in network descriptions of protein structure, dynamics and function. Hypotheses and a comprehensive review
During the last decade, network approaches became a powerful tool to describe protein structure and dynamics. Here we review the links between disordered proteins and the associated networks, and describe the consequences of local, mesoscopic and global network disorder on changes in protein structure and dynamics. We introduce a new classification of protein networks into ‘cumulus-type’, i.e., those similar to puffy (white) clouds, and ‘stratus-type’, i.e., those similar to flat, dense (dark) low-lying clouds, and relate these network types to protein disorder dynamics and to differences in energy transmission processes. In the first class, there is limited overlap between the modules, which implies higher rigidity of the individual units; there the conformational changes can be described by an ‘energy transfer’ mechanism. In the second class, the topology presents a compact structure with significant overlap between the modules; there the conformational changes can be described by ‘multi-trajectories’; that is, multiple highly populated pathways. We further propose that disordered protein regions evolved to help other protein segments reach ‘rarely visited’ but functionally-related states. We also show the role of disorder in ‘spatial games’ of amino acids; highlight the effects of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) on cellular networks and list some possible studies linking protein disorder and protein structure networks
A network model of interpersonal alignment in dialog
In dyadic communication, both interlocutors adapt to each other linguistically, that is, they align interpersonally. In this article, we develop a framework for modeling interpersonal alignment in terms of the structural similarity of the interlocutors’ dialog lexica. This is done by means of so-called two-layer time-aligned network series, that is, a time-adjusted graph model. The graph model is partitioned into two layers, so that the interlocutors’ lexica are captured as subgraphs of an encompassing dialog graph. Each constituent network of the series is updated utterance-wise. Thus, both the inherent bipartition of dyadic conversations and their gradual development are modeled. The notion of alignment is then operationalized within a quantitative model of structure formation based on the mutual information of the subgraphs that represent the interlocutor’s dialog lexica. By adapting and further developing several models of complex network theory, we show that dialog lexica evolve as a novel class of graphs that have not been considered before in the area of complex (linguistic) networks. Additionally, we show that our framework allows for classifying dialogs according to their alignment status. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to measuring alignment in communication that explores the similarities of graph-like cognitive representations. Keywords: alignment in communication; structural coupling; linguistic networks; graph distance measures; mutual information of graphs; quantitative network analysi
Entropic measures of individual mobility patterns
Understanding human mobility from a microscopic point of view may represent a
fundamental breakthrough for the development of a statistical physics for
cognitive systems and it can shed light on the applicability of macroscopic
statistical laws for social systems. Even if the complexity of individual
behaviors prevents a true microscopic approach, the introduction of mesoscopic
models allows the study of the dynamical properties for the non-stationary
states of the considered system. We propose to compute various entropy measures
of the individual mobility patterns obtained from GPS data that record the
movements of private vehicles in the Florence district, in order to point out
new features of human mobility related to the use of time and space and to
define the dynamical properties of a stochastic model that could generate
similar patterns. Moreover, we can relate the predictability properties of
human mobility to the distribution of time passed between two successive trips.
Our analysis suggests the existence of a hierarchical structure in the mobility
patterns which divides the performed activities into three different
categories, according to the time cost, with different information contents. We
show that a Markov process defined by using the individual mobility network is
not able to reproduce this hierarchy, which seems the consequence of different
strategies in the activity choice. Our results could contribute to the
development of governance policies for a sustainable mobility in modern cities
Exploring the movement dynamics of deception
Both the science and the everyday practice of detecting a lie rest on the same assumption: hidden cognitive states that the liar would like to remain hidden nevertheless influence observable behavior. This assumption has good evidence. The insights of professional interrogators, anecdotal evidence, and body language textbooks have all built up a sizeable catalog of non-verbal cues that have been claimed to distinguish deceptive and truthful behavior. Typically, these cues are discrete, individual behaviors—a hand touching a mouth, the rise of a brow—that distinguish lies from truths solely in terms of their frequency or duration. Research to date has failed to establish any of these non-verbal cues as a reliable marker of deception. Here we argue that perhaps this is because simple tallies of behavior can miss out on the rich but subtle organization of behavior as it unfolds over time. Research in cognitive science from a dynamical systems perspective has shown that behavior is structured across multiple timescales, with more or less regularity and structure. Using tools that are sensitive to these dynamics, we analyzed body motion data from an experiment that put participants in a realistic situation of choosing, or not, to lie to an experimenter. Our analyses indicate that when being deceptive, continuous fluctuations of movement in the upper face, and somewhat in the arms, are characterized by dynamical properties of less stability, but greater complexity. For the upper face, these distinctions are present despite no apparent differences in the overall amount of movement between deception and truth. We suggest that these unique dynamical signatures of motion are indicative of both the cognitive demands inherent to deception and the need to respond adaptively in a social context
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