Using Call Data and Stigmergic Similarity to Assess the Integration of Syrian Refugees in Turkey

By absorbing more than 3.4 millions Syrians, Turkey has shown a remarkable resilience. But the host community hostility toward these newcomers is rising. Thus, the formulation of effective integration policies is needed. However, assessing the effectiveness of such policies demands tools able to measure the integration of refugees despite the complexity of such phenomena. In this work, we propose a set of metrics aimed at providing insights and assessing the integration of Syrians refugees, by analyzing the CDR dataset of the challenge. Specifically, we aim at assessing the integration of refugees, by exploiting the similarity between refugees and locals in terms of calling behavior and mobility, considering different spatial and temporal features. Together with the already known methods for data analysis, in this work we use a novel computational approach to analyze users' mobility: computational stigmergy, a bio-inspired scalar and temporal aggregation of samples. Computational stigmergy associates each sample to a virtual pheromone deposit (mark) defined in a multidimensional space and characterized by evaporation over time. Marks in spatiotemporal proximity are aggregated into functional structures called trail. The stigmergic trail summarizes the spatiotemporal dynamics in data and allows to compute the stigmergic similarity between them

Legal Anarchism: Does Existence Need to Be Regulated by the State

This thesis asks does existence need to be regulated by the State? The answer relies on legal anarchism, an interdisciplinary, particularly criminal law and philosophy, and unconventional research project based on multiple methodologies with a specific language. It critically analyzes and consequently rejects State law because of its unjustified and unnecessary nature founded on unlimited violence and white-collar crime (Chapters 1-4), on the one hand, and suggests some alternatives to the Governmental legal system founded on agreement and peace (Chapter 5), on the other hand. It furthermore takes into account the elements of time and space, which means the ecological, local, national, regional, and international aspects of the legal system, in its analysis, critiques, and models

The co-evolution of networked terrorism and information technology

This thesis describes for the first time the mechanism by which high-performing terrorist networks leverage new iterations of information technology and the two interact in a mutually propulsive manner. Using process tracing as its methodology and complexity theory as its ontology, it identifies both terrorism and information technology as complex adaptive systems, a key characteristic of whose make-up is that they co-evolve in pursuit of augmented performance. It identifies this co-evolutionary mechanism as a classic information system that computes the additional scale with which the new technology imbues its terrorist partner, in other words, the force multiplier effect it enables. The thesis tests the mechanism’s theoretical application rigorously in three case studies spanning a period of more than a quarter of a century: Hezbollah and its migration from terrestrial to satellite broadcasting, Al Qaeda and its leveraging of the internet, and Islamic State and its rapid adoption of social media. It employs the NATO Allied Joint Doctrine for Intelligence Procedures estimative probability standard to link its assessment of causal inference directly to the data. Following the logic of complexity theory, it contends that a more twenty-first century interpretation of the key insight of RAND researchers in 1972 would be not that ‘terrorism evolves’ but that it co-evolves, and that co-evolution too is arguably the first logical explanation of the much-vaunted ‘symbiotic relationship’ between terrorists and the media that has been at the heart of the sub-discipline of terrorism studies for 50 years. It maintains that an understanding of terrorism based on co-evolution belatedly explains the newness of much-debated ‘new terrorism’. Looking forward, it follows the trajectory of terrorism driven by information technology and examines the degree to which the gradual symbiosis between biological and digital information, and the acknowledgment of human beings as reprogrammable information systems, is transforming the threat landscape