CSSS 2010 Santa Fe-Projects & Working Groups
From Santa Fe Institute Events Wiki
| CSSS Santa Fe 2010 |
Students are required to craft a research project -- use this page to brainstorm and organize your efforts.
Evolution of Words (Dan Rockmore) - In a class on complex systems that I teach at Dartmouth one of the final projects seemed to indicate from a small and somewhat biased sample of English words, that word origins (as indicated by one of the online dictionaries) seem clustered at certain times. As a start I would propose a mining of this info in some online dictionary, performing some initial analysis and see if "there is a there, there.." and if so, keep on going.
Dynamics of Equities Market Structure (Dan Rockmore) -- In a paper of mine w/some of my buddies (some of whom you will meet this summer), "Topological Structures in the Equities Market," PNAS December 30, 2008 vol. 105 no. 52 20589-20594, we found some interesting structure in the correlation network of the NYSE equities market. This required a choice of a time window. It would be interesting to see how/if this structure changes over time and window size, especially on either side of market crises. Scott Pauls has code that could be used to do some of this analysis.
Style of Chess Play (Dan Rockmore) -- I am curious to see if using tools from learning one can characterize the "style" of a chess player. The website www.playchess.com has a database of chess games. I'm not sure if the annotation would enable the determination of particular players, but even without that, can clustering on the move data give sensible/interesting results with respect to style of play?
Movement Careers of Couchsurfing.org members (Bogdan State) - I am working with Couchsurfing.org and two Stanford Professors in trying to analyze this social movement organization's member data. One aspect both we and the Couchsurfing management are interested in is the evolution of members in the movement over time. I would like to perform a preliminary analysis of these "movement careers", using a sample of about 10,000 nodes (out of 1.7 milion) we are scheduled to obtain soon.
"Genes for Breakfast" (Yixian Song) - I've once read a paper of Redfield(1993) "Genes for Breakfast: The Have-Your-Cake and-Eat-lt-Too of Bacterial Transformation". Though it's an old publication, I still find the idea very inspiring. Well, considering bacteria living in a gene-pool with abandoned DNA strands, each bacterium can randomly "eat" free DNA strands, and use them as nutrition or for DNA repairing or even gene improvement. But the DNA strands were abandoned for a reason. Some of them can be virulent.(!!!) Besides bacteria can exchange DNA with each other, of course. We can define a population size of bacteria, amount of free DNA strands in gene-pool, percentage of virulent DNA and their virulence (impact on the bacteria fitness). We certainly can also consider the bacteria as a metapopulation.("A metapopulation consists of a group of spatially separated populations of the same species which interact at some level." - says wikipedia.org) The question to be answered will be "in which situation the bacterial population will become extinct in the end".
Patterns in Cenozoic Western US volcanism (Leif Karlstrom) - Allen Glazner (UNC) has put together a neat database of volcanic activity over the past 65 million years in the Western US (here's a movie of it), including location, duration of activity and lava composition. This data is derived from several careers worth of geologic mapping and dating volcanic rocks exposed all over the West. While it is not complete (not everything is preserved, and not everything has been mapped yet), there is a wealth of information about volcanic processes in here. I think it would be neat to mine this dataset for correlations, then think about ways to model it. This could include actual physics and geology, but could also be based solely on the data.
Pitch diffusion in groups of musicians (Leif Karlstrom) - When the violin section of an orchestra tunes, the concertmaster gets up and plays a note that all the rest of the violins try to match. I did some experiments in my undergrad with John Toner (physics, U Oregon) where we looked at what happens when the frequency of this tuning note shifts during the time when players are actively trying to match one another. We found that the shifted pitch diffuses through group if it is a small shift (a few Hz), but is immediately sensed by the whole group if it is a large shift. This implies that there is a shift from local to long-range interaction that governs how pitch matching occurs. We envisioned a process similar to flocking behavior in birds for the local interactions, which is governed by an advection-diffusion equation. But we were unable to model the data with this model, because it does not allow for long-range interactions. I still have the data, and would be interested in thinking again about how people process sound in groups.
- Sounds like a cool topic! A quick question: do you have data on the social structure of the orchestra? It would be interesting to look at the formal hierarchy, as well as at the informal social network, and see if it has any influence on pitch diffusion, especially for the long-range interactions. (Question asked by Bogdan State)
Language Evolution in an Archipelago (Erika Fille Legara) - The Philippines is an archipelago containing 7,106 islands with three broader divisions (three main islands): Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. It has around 175 individual languages, four of which already have no more known speakers. Moreover, the Constitution recognizes eight (8) major and twelve (12) regional languages (statistics are taken from Wikipedia on the Philippines). It is also interesting to note that most Filipinos know at least three languages: (1) his/her native language, (2) Filipino, and (3) English. Now, if I could get data on the different language distributions (per year or per decade) within the archipelago, it might give us new insights on how certain languages evolve. It would also be interesting to model or predict which languages would eventually thrive and die. Also, I'd like to predict what would happen to certain languages at certain regional boundaries after a few decades or a few centuries. And finally, taking a hint from Professor Dan's idea (above), it may also be interesting to look at how certain words in the Filipino dictionary evolve through time. Caveat: I still need to check if we could have the data available before June.
Social Cognition: Defining the Situation (Lynette Shaw) – A foundational concept in social cognition is that of the “mental representation.” Essentially, this is a preexisting framework of meaning that is automatically imposed on perceived information in order to develop the inferences necessary for generating interpretations and expectations from that information. This basic concept bears a strong relationship to many popular ideas in the social sciences such as the “categories” involved in discrimination, cultural “schemas,” the “frames” of social movements, organizational “scripts,” and the “mental models” that are associated with institutions.
In his foundational piece, “On Perceptual Readiness,” Bruner proposes a very simple model of how these representations are essentially “selected for” on the basis of inference validation. Since that time, the complex interdependencies of this automatic, cognitive process occurring within a social context have been explicitly noted in work dealing with “expectancy confirmation.” Implicitly, the interdependent nature of this process within the social context has arguably undergirded several bodies of both classical and contemporary social theory - especially those relying on an idea of individuals reaching a “shared definition of the situation.”
Though this inference-validation model of mental representation is a relatively simple one, little work to date has really sought to represent it in ways that could be formally or systematically elaborated upon. This project would translate this conceptual model into an agent-based computer simulation and, if time allows, begin exploring key parameterizations of it that have interesting real world analogs.
- If I understand this correctly, I find it interesting :-) Ligtvoet 21:37, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
"Structure, Function and Spaces" (Giovanni Petri): recently networks have been studied in relation to their space embeddings (usually hyperbolic) for a number of reasons, for example efficient navigation, data filtering or visualization (see here, here and here). To wet your appetite, one of the fascinating results is that any graph can be embedded as a planar graph on a surface with sufficiently high genus (i.e. how many donut's hole you make in the space). Now I would be interested in studying whether such hidden metric space analogy goes a bit deeper. For example, whether there is a relation between diffusion and transport properties on a networks and its space embedding, whether interacting systems (think of correlation matrices, multi-body systems etc) can be cast in such form and some of their properties derived from the embedding space's characteristics (say genus, curvature etc etc). As I'm currently reading on the subject but don't have a precise idea how to implement it, I would very much like feedback from any interested peer/p.
"Ego'o'war" (Giovanni Petri): Brandes et al. (link broken) -> This seems to work recently extracted role-models for ego-networks from a dataset obtained through questionnaire in a large community of immigrants. It would be interesting to use some of the available data to try and identify behavioral archetypes (socialites, noobs, PKers, carebears, griefers etc etc) in online communities, how their interact and evolve. I'm thinking of virtual worlds (as Eve Online or Michael Szell's world for instance) as they do present a wider range of possible interactions than standard social networks, i.e. grouping, migrations, wars, commerce etc etc . This project however sounds pretty data-intensive and it might not be easy to get all the data involved.
- (Michael Szell) I have begun working on exactly this topic, in succession to this paper. See Video of an aggressive player. One could follow the evolution of some players and their activities in time, and see how their "careers" evolve. I am sure one could observe a lot of interesting things, e.g. "bursty" behavior, long-range correlations, non-gaussian distributions of activity... I can try to extract data from some players, so we can take a look at it in June.
Development of an online environment for simple behavioral experiments (Michael Szell): Classic "bottom-up" behavioral experiments, such as conducted by Henrich et al. or Traulsen et al. ..Meta-Info, face three main problems:
- ) It is highly cumbersome and resource-intensive to set up a physical environment, and to assemble enough subjects who take part in your experiments (usually they have to be paid)
- ) The subjects are often students or another possibly non-representative/biased sample of the human population
- ) It is not possible to assemble more than a few dozen/hundreds of subjects, leading to possibly non-significant results. Number of subjects scales linearly with cost.
It is baffling how scientists (with very few exceptions) have so far avoided the vastness of the internet population for conducting such behavioral experiments. Problem 1) can be solved with a relatively small amount of resources, by setting up an online environment for experiments. Problem 2) shifts, as the bias shifts (depending on the subjects you attract). However, problem 3) is solved instantly, as >10^4 subjects which you can easily motivate over time (with practically zero running cost) will guarantee statistical significance. My proposal is to gather experts in software engineering / web development / experimental setup, to develop such an online environment (as simple as possible). I suggest it should be AJAX+LAMP-based, portable, open-source, and as easy as possible to embed on any page having MySQL/PHP behind. This way it could serve its experiments as "mini-games" in e.g. bigger browser-games, or on other sites. The first implemented experiment could be the Ultimatum game. Note that I have no experience with AJAX, so this project would need someone qualified in this field.