5,144 research outputs found
FuturICT: Participatory computing to understand and manage our complex world in a more sustainable and resilient way
We have built particle accelerators to understand the forces that make up our physical world. Yet, we do not understand the princi-ples underlying our strongly connected, techno-socio-economic systems. We have enabled ubiquitous Internet connectivity and instant, global information access. Yet we do not understand how it impacts our be-havior and the evolution of society. To fill the knowledge gaps and keep up with the fast pace at which our world is changing, a Knowledge Accelerator must urgently be cre-ated. The financial crisis, international wars, global terror, the spread-ing of diseases and cyber-crime as well as demographic, technological and environmental change demonstrate that humanity is facing seri-ous challenges. These problems cannot be solved within the traditional paradigms. Moving our attention from a component-oriented view of the world to an interaction-oriented view will allow us to understand the com-plex systems we have created and the emergent collective phenomena characterising them. This paradigm shift will enable new solutions to long-standing problems, very much as the shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric worldview has facilitated modern physics and the ability to launch satellites. The FuturICT flagship project will develop new science and technology to manage our future in a complex, strongly connected world. For this, it will combine the power of information and communication technol-ogy (ICT) with knowledge from the social and complexity sciences. ICT will provide the data to boost the social sciences into a new era. Complexity science will shed new light on the emergent phenomena in socially interactive systems, and the social sciences will provide a better understanding of the opportunities and risks of strongly net-worked systems, in particular future ICT systems. Hence, the envisaged FuturICT flagship will create new methods and instruments to tackle the challenges of the 21 st century. FuturICT could indeed become one of the most important scientific endeavours ever, by revealing the principles that make socially inter-active systems work well, by inspiring the creation of new platforms to explore our possible futures, and by initiating an era of social and socio-inspired innovations
From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design
As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain
"ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in
socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a
network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run
all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback
and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the
reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying
models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy
decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of
Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but
they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of
society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The
results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into
informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis
Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources,
environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected
with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make
complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and
the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c
The structure and dynamics of multilayer networks
In the past years, network theory has successfully characterized the
interaction among the constituents of a variety of complex systems, ranging
from biological to technological, and social systems. However, up until
recently, attention was almost exclusively given to networks in which all
components were treated on equivalent footing, while neglecting all the extra
information about the temporal- or context-related properties of the
interactions under study. Only in the last years, taking advantage of the
enhanced resolution in real data sets, network scientists have directed their
interest to the multiplex character of real-world systems, and explicitly
considered the time-varying and multilayer nature of networks. We offer here a
comprehensive review on both structural and dynamical organization of graphs
made of diverse relationships (layers) between its constituents, and cover
several relevant issues, from a full redefinition of the basic structural
measures, to understanding how the multilayer nature of the network affects
processes and dynamics.Comment: In Press, Accepted Manuscript, Physics Reports 201
Measuring Belief Dynamics on Twitter
There is growing concern about misinformation and the role online media plays
in social polarization. Analyzing belief dynamics is one way to enhance our
understanding of these problems. Existing analytical tools, such as survey
research or stance detection, lack the power to correlate contextual factors
with population-level changes in belief dynamics. In this exploratory study, I
present the Belief Landscape Framework, which uses data about people's
professed beliefs in an online setting to measure belief dynamics with high
resolution. I provide initial validation of the approach by comparing the
method's output to a set of hypotheses drawn from the literature and by
inspecting the "belief landscape" generated by the method. My analysis
indicates that the method is relatively robust to different parameter settings,
and results suggest that 1) there are many stable configurations of belief, or
attractors, on the polarizing issue of climate change and 2) that people move
in predictable ways around these attractors. The method paves the way for more
powerful tools that can be used to understand how the modern digital media
ecosystem impacts collective belief dynamics and what role misinformation plays
in that process.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure, to appear in the Proceedings of ICWSM '2
Corporate Social Responsibility and the Sustainable Competitive Advantage
Being currently under the pressure of the various imbalances induced in the natural and social environment and faced with the deficiency of its own incremental growth, the economic system – which is exclusively focused on the economic performance – is currently going through a stage of global structural changes meant to connect it to the simple values of the community, society and even humanity as a requirement for its survival and development through the sustainable competitive advantage. Taking into consideration that globalization tends to quickly standardize technologies and to equalize the rates of profits, the area of competitive advantage is extended beyond the area of economic factors (product differentiation, cost reduction, etc.) in interferential areas, where factors such as social responsibility assumed by corporations become levers to increase competitiveness. Corporate social responsibility circumscribes the company’s set of obligations to the stakeholders (individuals, groups or organizations that are directly or indirectly affected by the actions, goals and policies of the corporation) in a certain system of reference. The multiple groups that make up the reference society of a corporation lead to a multitude of expectations. The legitimacy of these expectations embraces various degrees of validity. Responsibility is a continuous dynamic process meant to harmonize and balance the interests of various groups and the roles they play in relation to and for the purpose of the common good. So far, no system of indicators has been unanimously accepted and no methodology has been crystallized for measuring the effect of the social effort made in the sphere of social responsibility. Nevertheless, research performed over the past years has shown that an ethical behaviour involved in the issues of the natural, social and business environment has an obvious positive influence on the reputation and sales of the corporations. The corporations’ competitive strategies should include – apart from specific goals such as market share, product differentiation or smart promotion – the goal of harmonizing stakeholder expectations. In this context, the commitment to social responsibility becomes an important pillar in gaining the partners’ and the public’s confidence, along with a recognition that would strengthen the company’s market position and its commitment to a competitive sustainable approach.responsibility, social performance, sustainability, competitive advantage
- …