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

Big data, privacy, and trusted web: What needs to be done

This perspective paper discusses challenges and risks of the information age, and the implications for the information and communication technologies that need to be built and operated. It addresses ethical and policy issues related with Big Data and how procedures for privacy-preserving data analyses can be established. It further proposes a concept for a future, self-organising and trusted Web and discusses recommended legal regulations as well as the infrastructure and institutions needed

Big data, privacy, and trusted web: What needs to be done

This perspective paper discusses challenges and risks of the information age, and the implications for the information and communication technologies that need to be built and operated. It addresses ethical and policy issues related with Big Data and how procedures for privacy-preserving data analyses can be established. It further proposes a concept for a future, self-organising and trusted Web and discusses recommended legal regulations as well as the infrastructure and institutions needed

Meritocratic matching can dissolve the efficiency-equality tradeoff: the case of voluntary contributions

One of the fundamental tradeoffs underlying society is that between efficiency and equality. The challenge for institutional design is to strike the right balance between these two goals. Game-theoretic models of public-goods provision under ‘meritocratic matching’ succinctly capture this tradeoff: under zero meritocracy (society is randomly formed), theory predicts maximal inefficiency but perfect equality; higher levels of meritocracy (society matches contributors with contributors) are predicted to improve efficiency but come at the cost of growing inequality. We conduct an experiment to test this tradeoff behaviorally and make the astonishing finding that, notwithstanding theoretical predictions, higher levels of meritocracy increase both efficiency and equality, that is, meritocratic matching dissolves the tradeoff. Fairness considerations can explain the departures from theoretical predictions including the behavioral phenomena that lead to dissolution of the efficiency-equality tradeoff

The Governance of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: A Study of Contributors' Influence, Networks, and Shifts in Voting Power

We present a study analyzing the voting behavior of contributors, or vested users, in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). We evaluate their involvement in decision-making processes, discovering that in at least 7.54% of all DAOs, contributors, on average, held the necessary majority to control governance decisions. Furthermore, contributors have singularly decided at least one proposal in 20.41% of DAOs. Notably, contributors tend to be centrally positioned within the DAO governance ecosystem, suggesting the presence of inner power circles. Additionally, we observed a tendency for shifts in governance token ownership shortly before governance polls take place in 1202 (14.81%) of 8116 evaluated proposals. Our findings highlight the central role of contributors across a spectrum of DAOs, including Decentralized Finance protocols. Our research also offers important empirical insights pertinent to ongoing regulatory activities aimed at increasing transparency to DAO governance frameworks

Advances in Computational Social Science and Social Simulation

Aquesta conferència és la celebració conjunta de la "10th Artificial Economics Conference AE", la "10th Conference of the European Social Simulation Association ESSA" i la "1st Simulating the Past to Understand Human History SPUHH".Conferència organitzada pel Laboratory for Socio­-Historical Dynamics Simulation (LSDS-­UAB) de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.Readers will find results of recent research on computational social science and social simulation economics, management, sociology,and history written by leading experts in the field. SOCIAL SIMULATION (former ESSA) conferences constitute annual events which serve as an international platform for the exchange of ideas and discussion of cutting edge research in the field of social simulations, both from the theoretical as well as applied perspective, and the 2014 edition benefits from the cross-fertilization of three different research communities into one single event. The volume consists of 122 articles, corresponding to most of the contributions to the conferences, in three different formats: short abstracts (presentation of work-in-progress research), posters (presentation of models and results), and full papers (presentation of social simulation research including results and discussion). The compilation is completed with indexing lists to help finding articles by title, author and thematic content. We are convinced that this book will serve interested readers as a useful compendium which presents in a nutshell the most recent advances at the frontiers of computational social sciences and social simulation researc

The human quest for discovering mathematical beauty in the arts

In the words of the twentieth-century British mathematician G. H. Hardy, "the human function is to 'discover or observe' mathematics" (1). For centuries, starting from the ancient Greeks, mankind has hunted for beauty and order in arts and in nature. This quest for mathematical beauty has led to the discovery of recurrent mathematical structures, such as the golden ratio, Fibonacci, and Lucas numbers, whose ubiquitous presences have been tantalizing the minds of artists and scientists alike. The captivation for this quest comes with high stakes. In fact, art is the definitive expression of human creativity, and its mathematical understanding would deliver us the keys for decoding human culture and its evolution (2). However, it was not until fairly recently that the scope and the scale of the human quest for mathematical beauty was radically expanded by the simultaneous confluence of three separate innovations. The mass digitization of large art archives, the surge in computational power, and the development of robust statistical methods to capture hidden patterns in vast amounts of data have made it possible to reveal the---otherwise unnoticeable to the human eye---mathematics concealed in large artistic corpora. Starting from its inception, marked by the foundational work by Birkhoff (3), progress in the broad field of computational aesthetics has reached a scale that would have been unimaginable just a decade ago. The recent expansion is not limited to the visual arts (2) but includes music (4), stories (5), language phonology (6), humor in jokes (7), and even equations (8); for a comprehensive review, see ref. 9.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur