Complexity Explorables is a website where people easily explore some complex systems examples while playing models with fun.
For example, “I herd you!” enables you to explore how different network structures impact the spread of a disease in a population.… Read the rest
Noshir Contractor and Kyosuke Tanaka presented their research at the 68th Annual Conference of International Communication Association in Prague, the Czech Republic:
“It’s Nicky Case!” is a cool website where you can play different kinds of games related to network concepts such as complex contagion and small-world networks. Moreover, there are other games for game theory and theory of voting. Check out the website (http://ncase.me/)!… Read the rest
Sid Jha will give a lightning talk “A Computational Platform to Evaluate the Ability to Perceive Social Connections” at the 2018 Computational Research Day on April 10, 2018. Moreover, Sid and Matt (both Undergraduate Research Assistants at SONIC) will present their posters then, respectively:
Both abstracts and posters are available: http://computational-research-day.s3-website.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/posters/… Read the rest
Hanna Wallach published a thought piece of what computational social science is, especially from her computer science point of view. Given computational social science in mind, She made points of differences between computer science and social science in terms of goals, models, data, and challenges:
A recent study by David Melamed and his colleagues examined whether the emergent structures that promote cooperation are driven by reputation or can emerge purely via dynamics. To answer the research question, they recruited 1,979 Amazon Mechanical Turkers and asked them to play an iterated prisoner’s dilemma game.… Read the rest
Recently Aaron Clauset and his colleague share their new study: “Scale-free networks are rare”. In this study, they found scale-free network structure is not so prevalent based on their statistical analyses of almost 1000 network datasets across different domains. In particular, their results indicate only 4% of the datasets showing the strongest-possible evidence of scale-free structure and 52% demonstrating the weakest-possible evidence.… Read the rest
Recently, Omodei, Brashears, and Arenas published a paper about describing a mechanistic model of human network recall and demonstrate its sufficiency for capturing human recall behavior based on experimental data. They found that human recall is based on accurate recall of a hub of high degree actors and also uses compression heuristics (i.e., schemata simplifying the encoding and recall of social information) for both structural and affective information.… Read the rest
A recent study investigated a new way to identify the strength of ties. Using two different large datasets, the researchers found that for each pair of individuals, a bow tie structure of the network itself is strongly associated with the strength of ties between them that the researchers measure in other ways.… Read the rest
Researchers at Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania recently published a paper about “Network dynamics of social influence in the wisdom of crowds” in PNAS. They conducted an online network experiment where participants were asked to estimate numeric quantity (e.g., the caloric content) and tested how the accuracy of group estimates changes in different communication networks.… Read the rest