Individual Mobility Patterns in Urban Environment
The understanding and the characterisation of individual mobility patterns in urban environments is important in order to improve liveability and planning of big cities. In relatively recent times, the availability of data regarding human movements have fostered the emergence of a new branch of social studies, with the aim to unveil and study those patterns […]
Exploring the evolution of pathogens organised in discrete antigenic clusters
We present a numerical model for the evolution of pathogens organised in discrete antigenic clusters, where individuals in the same clusters have the same fitness. The fitness of each cluster is a decreasing function of the total number of cluster members appeared in the population. Cluster transition is modelled with inclusion and exclusion of dynamical […]
Analysis of the Structure and the Collaborative Dynamics of GitHub Projects
The recent spread of social networks and ICT systems has allowed for a huge availability of data on social phenomena and collective behaviour. This has induced a deep change in social dynamics field, that moved from an essentially theoretical approach to a strongly data driven one. In such framework, the present work aims at exploring […]
Crossing the horizon: exploring the adjacent possible in a cultural system
It is common opinion that many innovations are triggered by serendipity whose notion is associated with fortuitous events leading to unintended consequences. One might argue that this interpretation is due to the poor understanding of the dynamics of innovations. Very little is known, in fact, about how innovations proceed and samples the space of potential […]
Unveiling political opinion structures with a web-experiment
The dynamics of political votes has been widely studied, both for its practical interest and as a paradigm of the dynamics of mass opinions and collective phenomena, where theoretical predictions can be easily tested. However, the vote outcome is often influenced by many factors beyond the bare opinion on the candidate, and in most cases […]
Waves of Novelties in the Expansion into the Adjacent Possible
The emergence of novelties and their rise and fall in popularity is an ubiquitous phenomenon in human activities. The coexistence of always popular milestones with novel and sometimes ephemeral trends pervades technological, scientific and artistic production. By introducing suitable statistical measures, we demonstrate that different systems of human activities, i.e. the creation of hashtags in […]
Peer-to-peer Control System for DC Microgrids
We propose and implement a dc microgrid with a fully decentralized control system, using the ICT concept of network overlays and peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Decentralization not only concerns the physical systems and control logic but also the control structure which provides the network infrastructure on which Energy Management is carried out. In this study, we […]
Dynamics on Expanding Spaces: Modeling the Emergence of Novelties
Novelties are part of our daily lives. We constantly adopt new technologies, conceive new ideas, meet new people, and experiment with new situations. Occasionally, we as individual, in a complicated cognitive and sometimes fortuitous process, come up with something that is not only new to us, but to our entire society so that what is […]
Agroecology: A Fertile Field for Human Computation
The Emergence Of Rules And Exceptions In A Population Of Interacting Agents
Rules are an efficient feature of natural languages which allow speakers to use a finite set of instructions to generate a virtually infinite set of utterances. Yet, for many regular rules, there are irregular exceptions. There has been lively debate in cognitive science about how individual learners acquire rules and exceptions; for example, how they […]