Complexity

Video of my interview about the complexity of Urban Systems at the Centro de Ciencias de la Complejidad (C3) de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

From the “Small World Experiment” to the “Red Balloon Challenge,” and beyond We live in a small world, right? But the cost and fragility of navigating it could harm any potential strategy to leverage the power of social networks. Read this fascinating story of the research, experiments, and failures in the quest for using social networks to search information/people: [Excerpt of the article] Our ability to search social networks for people and information is fundamental to our success. ...

Authors: Alex Bladon, Esteban Moro y Tobias Galla Journal: Physical Review E 85, 036103 (2012) LINK | arXiv Abstract: We present an analysis of the price impact associated with single trades effected by different financial firms. Using data from the Spanish Stock Market, we find a high degree of heterogeneity across different market members, both in the instantaneous impact functions and in the time-dependent market response to trades by individual members. ...

We (together with Kimmo Kaski, Aalto University) are organizing the ECCS'11 Satellite conference “Complex Dynamics of Human Interactions” to be held at Vienna, September 14th. You can find more info at http://www.complexdynamics.org “It’s not enough to have a map of the structure. It is crucial to understand the dynamics of a process”, L. Barábasi Scope The nature of human interaction has undergone a substantial change in the past years and the change does not seem to be over. ...

Each day trillions of emails, phone calls, comments on blogs, twitter messages, exchanges in online social networks, etc. are done. Not only the number of communications has increased, but also each of these transactions leaves a digital trace that can be recorded to reconstruct our high-frequency human activity. It is not only the amount and variety of data that is recorded what is important. Also its high-frequency character and its comprehensive nature have allowed researchers, companies and agencies to investigate individual and group dynamics at an unprecedented level of detail and applied them to client modeling, organizational analysis or epidemic spreading [1]. ...

A wonderful quote about the nature of Game Theory Game theory is no doubt wonderful for telling stories. However, it flunks the main test of any scientific theory: The ability to make empirically testable predictions. In most real-life situations, many different outcomes -- from full cooperation to near-disastrous conflict -- are consistent with the game-theory version of rationality.  by Michael Mandel, on Kahneman and Smith 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics. ...