How are topics born? Understanding the research dynamics preceding the emergence of new areas

The ability to promptly recognise new research trends is strategic for many stake- holders, including universities, institutional funding bodies, academic publishers and companies. While the literature describes several approaches which aim to identify the emergence of new research topics early in their lifecycle, these rely on the assumption that the topic in question is already associated with a number of publications and consistently referred to by a community of researchers. Hence, detecting the emergence of a new research area at an embryonic stage, i.e., before the topic has been consistently labelled by a community of researchers and associated with a number of publications, is still an open challenge. In this paper, we begin to address this challenge by performing a study of the dynamics preceding the creation of new topics. This study indicates that the emergence of a new topic is anticipated by a significant increase in the pace of collaboration between relevant research areas, which can be seen as the ‘parents’ of the new topic. These initial findings (i) confirm our hypothesis that it is possible in principle to detect the emergence of a new topic at the embryonic stage, (ii) provide new empirical evidence supporting relevant theories in Philosophy of Science, and also (iii) suggest that new topics tend to emerge in an environment in which weakly interconnected research areas begin to cross-fertilise

Minimum Restraint Functions for unbounded dynamics: general and control-polynomial systems

We consider an exit-time minimum problem with a running cost, $l\geq 0$ and unbounded controls. The occurrence of points where $l=0$ can be regarded as a transversality loss. Furthermore, since controls range over unbounded sets, the family of admissible trajectories may lack important compactness properties. In the first part of the paper we show that the existence of a $p_0$-minimum restraint function provides not only global asymptotic controllability (despite non-transversality) but also a state-dependent upper bound for the value function (provided $p_0>0$). This extends to unbounded dynamics a former result which heavily relied on the compactness of the control set. In the second part of the paper we apply the general result to the case when the system is polynomial in the control variable. Some elementary, algebraic, properties of the convex hull of vector-valued polynomials' ranges allow some simplifications of the main result, in terms of either near-affine-control systems or reduction to weak subsystems for the original dynamics.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1503.0344

2100 AI: Reflections on the mechanisation of scientific discovery

The pace of research is nowadays extremely intensive, with datasets and publications being published at an unprecedented rate. In this context data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data analytics are providing researchers with new automatic techniques which not only help them to manage this flow of information but are also able to identify automatically interesting patterns and insights in this vast sea of information. However, the emergence of mechanised scientific discovery is likely to dramatically change the way we do science, thus introducing and amplifying serious societal implications on the role of researchers themselves, which need to be analysed thoroughly

Spectral variability in Swift and Chandra observations of the Ultraluminous source NGC 55 ULX1

NGC 55 ULX1 is a bright Ultraluminous X-ray source located 1.78 Mpc away. We analysed a sample of 20 Swift observations, taken between 2013 April and August, and two Chandra observations taken in 2001 September and 2004 June. We found only marginal hints of a limited number of dips in the light curve, previously reported to occur in this source, although the uncertainties due to the low counting statistics of the data are large. The Chandra and Swift spectra showed clearly spectral variability which resembles those observed in other ULXs. We can account for this spectral variability in terms of changes in both the normalization and intrinsic column density of a two-components model consisting of a blackbody (for the soft component) and a multicolour accretion disc (for the hard component). We discuss the possibility that strong outflows ejected by the disc are in part responsible for such spectral changes.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure; accepted to be published on MNRA

Diurnal experiment data report, 19-20 March 1974

Temperature and wind data are presented from 70 small meteorological sounding rockets launched from eight selected launch sites in the Western Hemisphere. Table 1 gives a complete listing of the launch sites involved and the altitude of temperature and wind observations successfully completed