Tracing the Use of Practices through Networks of Collaboration

An active line of research has used on-line data to study the ways in which discrete units of information---including messages, photos, product recommendations, group invitations---spread through social networks. There is relatively little understanding, however, of how on-line data might help in studying the diffusion of more complex {\em practices}---roughly, routines or styles of work that are generally handed down from one person to another through collaboration or mentorship. In this work, we propose a framework together with a novel type of data analysis that seeks to study the spread of such practices by tracking their syntactic signatures in large document collections. Central to this framework is the notion of an "inheritance graph" that represents how people pass the practice on to others through collaboration. Our analysis of these inheritance graphs demonstrates that we can trace a significant number of practices over long time-spans, and we show that the structure of these graphs can help in predicting the longevity of collaborations within a field, as well as the fitness of the practices themselves.Comment: To Appear in Proceedings of ICWSM 2017, data at https://github.com/CornellNLP/Macro

Network resilience

Many systems on our planet are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across a "tipping point," such as mass extinctions in ecological networks, cascading failures in infrastructure systems, and social convention changes in human and animal networks. Such a regime shift demonstrates a system's resilience that characterizes the ability of a system to adjust its activity to retain its basic functionality in the face of internal disturbances or external environmental changes. In the past 50 years, attention was almost exclusively given to low dimensional systems and calibration of their resilience functions and indicators of early warning signals without considerations for the interactions between the components. Only in recent years, taking advantages of the network theory and lavish real data sets, network scientists have directed their interest to the real-world complex networked multidimensional systems and their resilience function and early warning indicators. This report is devoted to a comprehensive review of resilience function and regime shift of complex systems in different domains, such as ecology, biology, social systems and infrastructure. We cover the related research about empirical observations, experimental studies, mathematical modeling, and theoretical analysis. We also discuss some ambiguous definitions, such as robustness, resilience, and stability.Comment: Review chapter

Chaos and context : speculations about the prominence of participatory art since the mid 1990s

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 53-58).In his essay The Poetics of the Open Work, Umberto Eco suggests that 'open work' of the 1960s, which stressed audience involvement, contingency and an anti-institutional stance, is an expression of a Quantum paradigm. Here, the irrationality and lack of order of Quantum Theory is seen as paralleled in artistic expression. Since the mid 1990s, participatory art has gained prominence, both in terms of current art production and retrospectives of Dadaist and 1960s 'open work'. Using Eco's essay as a model, this could be seen as a result of the progression of a Quantum Theory worldview to a view that is understood in terms of Chaos Theory. The patterns that mathematical models such as natural numbers, Calculus, Statistical Mathematics and Quantum Theory propose have parallels in social and artistic expression. In an extension of this, Chaos Theory is the latest mathematical model that social and artistic trends express. This is suggested by the mirroring of Chaos patterns in current social phenomena such as the Internet and experience economy. The similarity in approach between social phenomena and participatory art suggests that they answer the same social/audience demands. My primary contention is that the environment in which audiences and artists currently operate is such that demands and expectations raised by Chaos Theory are answered by participatory art, just as they are answered by wider social trends. The primary Chaos patterns that can be observed are interconnection, phase change and feedback. This is not a matter of a linear influence of cause and effect. It is not that Chaos inspires certain characteristics which are then expressed in various social phenomena. Rather, encountering Chaos characteristics in daily life raises expectations that these characteristics will be encountered elsewhere. We are thus not speaking of a causative relation between Chaos theory and social phenomena. Rather, there is a complex pattern of escalation which encourages interaction, feedback and phase change in a dynamic, chiasmic system which itself can best be analysed as another Chaos phenomenon

The role of textual data in finance: methodological issues and empirical evidence

This thesis investigates the role of textual data in the financial field. Textual data fall into the more extensive category of alternative data. These types of data, such as reviews, blog post, tweet, are constantly growing, and this reinforces the importance in several domains. The thesis explores different applications of textual data in finance to highlight how it is possible to use this type of data and how this implementation can add value to financial analysis. The first application concerns the use of a lexicon-based approach in the credit scoring model. The second application proposes a causality detection between financial and sentiment data using an information-theoretic measure, the transfer entropy. The last application concerns the use of sentiment analysis in a network model, called BGVAR, to analyze the financial impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Overall, this thesis shows that combining textual data with traditional financial data can lead to a more insightful knowledge and, therefore, to a more in-depth analysis, allowing for a broader understanding of economic events and financial relationships among economic entities of any kind

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Networks of change: extending Alaska-based communication networks to meet the challenges of the anthropocene

Thesis (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017The Anthropocene is a contested term. As I conceptualize it throughout this dissertation, the Anthropocene is defined by an increased coupling of social and environmental systems at the global scale such that the by-products of human processes dominate the global stratigraphic record. Additionally, I connect the term to a worldview that sees this increased coupling as an existential threat to humanity's ability to sustain life on the planet. Awareness that the planet-wide scale of this coupling is fundamentally a new element in earth history is implicit in both understandings. How individuals and communities are impacted by this change varies greatly depending on a host of locally specific cross-scale factors. The range of scales (physical and social) that must be negotiated to manage these impacts places novel demands on the communication networks that shape human agency. Concern for how these demands are being met, and whose interests are being served in doing so, are the primary motivation for my research. My work is grounded in the communication-oriented theoretical traditions of media ecology and the more recent social-ecological system conceptualizations promoted in the study of resilience. I combine these ideas through a mixed methodology of digital ethnography and social network analysis to explore the communication dynamics of four Alaska-based social-ecological systems. The first two examples capture communication networks that formed in response to singular, rapid change environmental events (a coastal storm and river flood). The latter two map communication networks that have formed in response to more diffuse, slower acting environmental changes (a regional webinar series and an international arctic change conference). In each example, individuals or organizations enter and exit the mapped network(s) as they engage in the issue and specific communication channel being observed. Under these parameters a cyclic pattern of network expansion and contraction is identified. Expansion events are heavily influenced by established relationships retained during previous contraction periods. Many organizational outreach efforts are focused on triggering and participating in expansion events, however my observations highlight the role of legacy networks in system change. I suggest that for organizations interested in fostering sustainable socialecological relationships in the Anthropocene, strategic intervention may best be accomplished through careful consideration of how communicative relationships are maintained immediately following and in between expansion events. In the final sections of my dissertation I present a process template to support organizations interested in doing so. I include a complete set of learning activities to facilitate organizational use as well as examples of how the Alaska Native Knowledge Network is currently applying the process to meet their unique organizational needs