Complex Systems Summer School 2012-Project Presentations

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Use this space to post project presentations and outlines. Include group members, a brief outline, and your slides.

Collaboration in times of stress: an Agent Based Modelling approach

Fabio Cresto Aleina, Elena del Val, Tom Fennewald and Friederike Greb

We want to investigate the influence of exogenous stress on cooperative behaviour. We propose an agent based model in which the agents can be interpreted as farmers living in a water limited environment. With changes in precipitation patterns, the farmers undergo stress, and we observe how this impacts relationships among farmers and their properties.

Simple variation of the logistic map as a model to invoke questions on cellular protein trafficking

(Sepehr Ehsani, http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.5557)

Many open problems in biology, as in the physical sciences, display nonlinear and 'chaotic' dynamics, which, to the extent possible, cannot be reasonably understood. Moreover, mathematical models which aim to predict/estimate unknown aspects of a biological system cannot provide more information about the set of biologically meaningful (e.g., 'hidden') states of the system than could be understood by the designer of the model ab initio. Here, the case is made for the utilization of such models to shift from a 'predictive' to a 'questioning' nature, and a simple natural-logarithm variation of the logistic polynomial map is presented that can invoke questions about protein trafficking in eukaryotic cells.

Changes in Social Network Structure in Response to Crisis: Using Twitter data to Explore the Effect of the Tōhoku Earthquake.

Christa Brelsford and Xin Lu

Abstract: We use twitter data from 7 days before and after the Tōhoku Earthquake to explore how cooperation rates, social network structure and connectivity, and social network vulnerability changed in Japan in response to the disaster. An English language data set is collected for the same time period to use as a control. Data is collected for a period of 96 hours starting from March 4th 2011 2:46pm JST and for 96 hours beginning March 11th 2011 2:46 pm JST. The rate of cooperative behavior, measured by the occurrence of helping words in tweets increases slightly in the English dataset and by an order of magnitude in the Japanese dataset. A network analysis is also performed. Network edges are retweets and direct messages. In future work, we hope to explore whether problem solving capacity in a social system changes in response to crises, based on changes in the rate of cooperation and information transfer in a network.