Evolutionary games on graphs

Game theory is one of the key paradigms behind many scientific disciplines from biology to behavioral sciences to economics. In its evolutionary form and especially when the interacting agents are linked in a specific social network the underlying solution concepts and methods are very similar to those applied in non-equilibrium statistical physics. This review gives a tutorial-type overview of the field for physicists. The first three sections introduce the necessary background in classical and evolutionary game theory from the basic definitions to the most important results. The fourth section surveys the topological complications implied by non-mean-field-type social network structures in general. The last three sections discuss in detail the dynamic behavior of three prominent classes of models: the Prisoner's Dilemma, the Rock-Scissors-Paper game, and Competing Associations. The major theme of the review is in what sense and how the graph structure of interactions can modify and enrich the picture of long term behavioral patterns emerging in evolutionary games.Comment: Review, final version, 133 pages, 65 figure

Emergence of collective behaviour. How Individual Regulation Matters in Elaborating Team Patterns in Football

This project analysed processes leading to the emergence of collective behaviour patterns. Collective behaviour, considered as self-organized, emerges from individual activities that interplay as the activity unfolds. One aim of this project was to explore how individuals regulate their activity to participate to the elaboration of collective behaviour. Sport science literature did not consider the individual regulation as a main focus to understand team behaviour. The regulation has been assumed rather than investigated. To this end, we described the variety of informational resources used by team members during a football game. We adopted an epistemological approach that was respectful of how humans regulate their agent-environment coupling, which was the enactive approach. From this approach, sense-making is assumed to be central in delineating the dynamics of the agent-environment coupling, and the phenomenological experience of the agent was seriously considered in the study designs. The results identified various informational resources, which we ranked along a continuum from local resources to global resources. The subsequent goal was to understand the relationship between individual regulation and its consequences in the collective behaviour. Grounded in the use of a computer simulation tool, the project simulated the spatiotemporal collective behaviour of a multi-agent system built to capture the essentials of football team behaviours and to evaluate how the dynamical outcomes (i.e., the collective behaviour patterns) depend on individual adjustment modalities. These adjustment modalities were implemented in the simulation. More specifically, the simulation study generated a large amount of spatiotemporal data that are hard to capture in ecological situation with natural setting, in order to test to what extent the collective behaviour dynamical outcomes were changed when a single players changed their adjustments. The collective behaviour was characterised through metrics accounting for team spatiotemporal properties such as surface area and team stretching. The results showed a condensed behaviour associated with the local adjustment modality and a deployed behaviour associated with global adjustment modalities. A complementary study investigated the possibilities of controlling human regulation through interaction rules. The results showed that various interaction rules involved different informational resources and adjustment modality. Moreover, the results demonstrated that a local informational resource did not necessarily involve a local adjustment which describe the complexity of the regulation processes

SEGMENTATION, RECOGNITION, AND ALIGNMENT OF COLLABORATIVE GROUP MOTION

Modeling and recognition of human motion in videos has broad applications in behavioral biometrics, content-based visual data analysis, security and surveillance, as well as designing interactive environments. Significant progress has been made in the past two decades by way of new models, methods, and implementations. In this dissertation, we focus our attention on a relatively less investigated sub-area called collaborative group motion analysis. Collaborative group motions are those that typically involve multiple objects, wherein the motion patterns of individual objects may vary significantly in both space and time, but the collective motion pattern of the ensemble allows characterization in terms of geometry and statistics. Therefore, the motions or activities of an individual object constitute local information. A framework to synthesize all local information into a holistic view, and to explicitly characterize interactions among objects, involves large scale global reasoning, and is of significant complexity. In this dissertation, we first review relevant previous contributions on human motion/activity modeling and recognition, and then propose several approaches to answer a sequence of traditional vision questions including 1) which of the motion elements among all are the ones relevant to a group motion pattern of interest (Segmentation); 2) what is the underlying motion pattern (Recognition); and 3) how two motion ensembles are similar and how we can 'optimally' transform one to match the other (Alignment). Our primary practical scenario is American football play, where the corresponding problems are 1) who are offensive players; 2) what are the offensive strategy they are using; and 3) whether two plays are using the same strategy and how we can remove the spatio-temporal misalignment between them due to internal or external factors. The proposed approaches discard traditional modeling paradigm but explore either concise descriptors, hierarchies, stochastic mechanism, or compact generative model to achieve both effectiveness and efficiency. In particular, the intrinsic geometry of the spaces of the involved features/descriptors/quantities is exploited and statistical tools are established on these nonlinear manifolds. These initial attempts have identified new challenging problems in complex motion analysis, as well as in more general tasks in video dynamics. The insights gained from nonlinear geometric modeling and analysis in this dissertation may hopefully be useful toward a broader class of computer vision applications

An Exploratory Study of a Coach's Response to Mandated Regulation Change

In 2017 the University Interscholastic League mandated a regulation change that all Texas high school football coaches required certification through Atavus Tackling Training. The mandate represented a significant modification to the way tackling is taught, aimed at addressing risk of concussion and serious trauma. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore how coaches’ respond to mandated regulation change. This qualitative study utilized an individual level of analysis contributing to academic works concerning the understanding of organizational change, including the use of Bridges’ (1991) Transition Model within a sporting context, and the call for agent focused perspective work in neo-institutional theory. Through an abductive analysis blend consisting of inductive coding, and deductive a priori concept of the Bridges Transition Model, this study aimed to discern the role transition played in actualizing institutional change by addressing the research questions: RQ1: How do coaches respond when faced with mandated regulation change? RQ2: How does their response reflect transition? To account for the complex nature of the 15 interviewed head football coaches’ responses, the qualitative methodology of this study utilized various triangulation methods such as data, analysis, and theory triangulation, to capture rigor and trustworthiness. Rich findings were mined from the data including 15 propositional statements that represented the a priori model and 10 inductive themes that contributed to defining the identity of a coach, and the sport. The overlap between inductive and deductive findings explored factors earmarking why coaches progress or regress through transition. This study found a relationship between responses and the Bridges Transition Model phases (addressing RQ2), in addition to multiple transition cycles, and triggers for movement through the phases based on coaches' individual needs. This research not only provided examples of what those responses were (addressing RQ1), but also discussed why coaches responded in various ways. Discussion included use of organizational change literature, Bridges’ (1991) Transition Model, and institutional theory, accounting for what coaches experienced and the beliefs and values impacting their decisions and thus, responses to mandated regulation change

Embodied creativity: a process continuum from artistic creation to creative participation

This thesis breaks new ground by attending to two contemporary developments in art and science. In art, computer-mediated interactive artworks comprise creative engagement between collaborating practitioners and a creatively participating audience, erasing all notions of a dividing line between them. The procedural character of this type of communicative real-time interaction replaces the concept of a finished artwork with a ‘field of artistic communication’. In science, the field of creativity research investigates creative thought as mental operations that combine and reorganise extant knowledge structures. A recent paradigm shift in cognition research acknowledges that cognition is embodied. Neither embodiment in cognition nor the ‘field of artistic communication’ in interactive art have been assimilated by creativity research. This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to examine the embodied cognitive processes in a ‘field of artistic communication’ using a media artwork called Sim-Suite as a case study research strategy. This interactive installation, created and exhibited in an authentic real-world context, engages three people to play on wobble-boards. The thesis argues that creative processes related to Sim-Suite operate within a continuum, encompassing collaborative artistic creation and cooperative creative participation. This continuum is investigated via mixed methods, conducting studies with qualitative and quantitative analysis. These are interpreted through a theoretical lens of embodied cognition principles, the 4E approaches. The results obtained demonstrate that embodied cognitive processes in Sim-Suite’s ‘field of artistic communication’ function on a continuum. We give an account of the creative process continuum relating our findings to the ‘embedded-extended-enactive lens’, empirical studies in embodied cognition and creativity research. Within this context a number of topics and sub-themes are identified. We discuss embodied communication, aspects of agency, forms of coordination, levels of evaluative processes and empathetic foundation. The thesis makes conceptual, empirical and methodological contributions to creativity research

Patterns of Role Transition: A Taxonomy, A Research Program, and the Three-Body Problem

In foreign policy, role transition as a process of role change implies at least two roles (a state\u27ʹs old role and its new role) and a dynamic process of role location in which Ego’s role changes over time. If every role for Ego presumes a counter-role for Alter, a pattern of role transition for Ego implies as well a potential process of role transition for Alter. In order to model the process of role transition, a taxonomy of mutually exclusive and logically exhaustive roles and counter-roles is desirable, in order to identify and specify the possible combinations of old and new roles as patterns of role transition. Binary role theory provides a taxonomy that meets these criteria and is employed in this paper to model the process of role transition as a transition in Grand Strategy Orientations. The binary model is complete in a way that three-way (or multi-way) models cannot be. Several hypotheses about the role of domestic politics in foreign policy role transitions, however, suggest the conditions under which unstable triads may become provisionally stable. Application of the resulting model to selected episodes of role transition in triadic relations among China, the Soviet Union, the United States, Japan, and South Korea illustrates the model’s potential descriptive and explanatory power for analyzing strategic triads and the contours of a research program for understanding foreign policy change as a role transition process

The Cold Peace: Russo-Western Relations as a Mimetic Cold War

In 1989–1991 the geo-ideological contestation between two blocs was swept away, together with the ideology of civil war and its concomitant Cold War played out on the larger stage. Paradoxically, while the domestic sources of Cold War confrontation have been transcended, its external manifestations remain in the form of a ‘legacy’ geopolitical contest between the dominant hegemonic power (the United States) and a number of potential rising great powers, of which Russia is one. The post-revolutionary era is thus one of a ‘cold peace’. A cold peace is a mimetic cold war. In other words, while a cold war accepts the logic of conflict in the international system and between certain protagonists in particular, a cold peace reproduces the behavioural patterns of a cold war but suppresses acceptance of the logic of behaviour. A cold peace is accompanied by a singular stress on notions of victimhood for some and undigested and bitter victory for others. The perceived victim status of one set of actors provides the seedbed for renewed conflict, while the ‘victory’ of the others cannot be consolidated in some sort of relatively unchallenged post-conflict order. The ‘universalism’ of the victors is now challenged by Russia's neo-revisionist policy, including not so much the defence of Westphalian notions of sovereignty but the espousal of an international system with room for multiple systems (the Schmittean pluriverse)