Growth and Containment of a Hierarchical Criminal Network

We model the hierarchical evolution of an organized criminal network via antagonistic recruitment and pursuit processes. Within the recruitment phase, a criminal kingpin enlists new members into the network, who in turn seek out other affiliates. New recruits are linked to established criminals according to a probability distribution that depends on the current network structure. At the same time, law enforcement agents attempt to dismantle the growing organization using pursuit strategies that initiate on the lower level nodes and that unfold as self-avoiding random walks. The global details of the organization are unknown to law enforcement, who must explore the hierarchy node by node. We halt the pursuit when certain local criteria of the network are uncovered, encoding if and when an arrest is made; the criminal network is assumed to be eradicated if the kingpin is arrested. We first analyze recruitment and study the large scale properties of the growing network; later we add pursuit and use numerical simulations to study the eradication probability in the case of three pursuit strategies, the time to first eradication and related costs. Within the context of this model, we find that eradication becomes increasingly costly as the network increases in size and that the optimal way of arresting the kingpin is to intervene at the early stages of network formation. We discuss our results in the context of dark network disruption and their implications on possible law enforcement strategies.Comment: 16 pages, 11 Figures; New title; Updated figures with color scheme better suited for colorblind readers and for gray scale printin

IPv6 Network Mobility

Network Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting has been used since before the days of the Internet as we know it today. Authentication asks the question, “Who or what are you?” Authorization asks, “What are you allowed to do?” And fi nally, accounting wants to know, “What did you do?” These fundamental security building blocks are being used in expanded ways today. The fi rst part of this two-part series focused on the overall concepts of AAA, the elements involved in AAA communications, and highlevel approaches to achieving specifi c AAA goals. It was published in IPJ Volume 10, No. 1[0]. This second part of the series discusses the protocols involved, specifi c applications of AAA, and considerations for the future of AAA

Emergence Antecedents of Enterprise Social Media Networks: A Literature Review and Directions for Future Research

What drives the emergence of enterprise social media (ESM) networks? This question cannot be fully answered without studying the scattered body of knowledge. The current research in progress paper addresses this question by means of a preliminary literature review. Precisely, it synthesizes 34 literature findings into a preliminary literature review, which will be further refined and augmented by a research agenda in the future steps. The main theoretical contribution of this paper is to describe 21 antecedents that drive ESM network emergence. In practice, knowledge about these emergence antecedents can be used for various application cases. Examples include developing ESM recommender systems, creating ESM network simulation models, and planning and conducting organizational interventions to optimize ESM networks

Impact in networks and ecosystems: building case studies that make a difference

open accessThis toolkit aims to support the building up of case studies that show the impact of project activities aiming to promote innovation and entrepreneurship. The case studies respond to the challenge of understanding what kinds of interventions work in the Southern African region, where, and why. The toolkit has a specific focus on entrepreneurial ecosystems and proposes a method of mapping out the actors and their relationships over time. The aim is to understand the changes that take place in the ecosystems. These changes are seen to be indicators of impact as increased connectivity and activity in ecosystems are key enablers of innovation. Innovations usually happen together with matching social and institutional adjustments, facilitating the translation of inventions into new or improved products and services. Similarly, the processes supporting entrepreneurship are guided by policies implemented in the common framework provided by innovation systems. Overall, policies related to systems of innovation are by nature networking policies applied throughout the socioeconomic framework of society to pool scarce resources and make various sectors work in coordination with each other. Most participating SAIS countries already have some kinds of identifiable systems of innovation in place both on national and regional levels, but the lack of appropriate institutions, policies, financial instruments, human resources, and support systems, together with underdeveloped markets, create inefficiencies and gaps in systemic cooperation and collaboration. In other words, we do not always know what works and what does not. On another level, engaging users and intermediaries at the local level and driving the development of local innovation ecosystems within which local culture, especially in urban settings, has evident impact on how collaboration and competition is both seen and done. In this complex environment, organisations supporting entrepreneurship and innovation often find it difficult to create or apply relevant knowledge and appropriate networking tools, approaches, and methods needed to put their processes to work for broader developmental goals. To further enable these organisations’ work, it is necessary to understand what works and why in a given environment. Enhanced local and regional cooperation promoted by SAIS Innovation Fund projects can generate new data on this little-explored area in Southern Africa. Data-driven knowledge on entrepreneurship and innovation support best practices as well as effective and efficient management of entrepreneurial ecosystems can support replication and inform policymaking, leading thus to a wider impact than just that of the immediate reported projects and initiatives

Heavy-tailed DecentraPunks - Exploring the Structure of NFT Sales Networks

Non-fungible Tokens (NFT) have received increased attention since 2021. The availability of the vast amount of public sales transaction data has created an unprecedented opportunity that calls for research to uncover the underlying mechanism in which NFT networks evolve. Our main goal is to understand the new space of NFT-based crypto art exchange and the structure of the trading network. We use data from the Crypto Punks collection and perform a data-driven quantitative study based on real-time trading and sales data to carry out a two-folded methodological approach that is first applied to this domain. We borrow the citation analysis and social network analysis from bibliometrics and the social network domain and apply them to the NFT space to explore the trading network structure. We found that despite being based on unique and non-interchangeable tokens, the NFT-based CryptoPunks transactions network follows the scale-free network structure, the similar pattern that is observed in Web 2.0 social networks and cryptocurrency transaction networks, where a few actors have dominant centrality. Our study demonstrates the applicability of the two approaches from bibliometrics and social network analysis to the context of unique digital assets trading