Complexity and Social Networks Blog

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30 September 2008

Regulating the madness of crowds...

Before there was "crowd sourcing" there was the "madness of crowds." The current economic crisis raises an interesting question: how does one "regulate away" the madness of crowds? While there was likely a degree of moral hazard in the behavior of the financial sector over the last few years (i.e., rationally taking overly risky behavior in the belief that the government will bail them out should things get really bad), my intuition is that the main thing that has created fragility in the system is a convergence in mindset. That is, arguably, there was a convergence in belief about the value of particular assets-- these subprime based securities. Given modern day communication technology, and the generally small world of the financial sector, would it be surprising for there to be a convergence in beliefs about what these securities were worth? and this convergence must create some fragility-- even if it is unbiased-- because if the mean person is wrong, it means everyone is wrong, and that everyone falls off the cliff at the same time.

Of course, the madness of crowds (as the book illustrates) goes back a long ways. And we have built rather robust financial regulatory institutions that have, generally, since the Great Depression, reduced the vulnerability of the financial sector. But it does seem that there has been a paradigm change over the last generation, with the development of more complex (and ambiguously valued) financial instruments, and increased global communication, that perhaps make us more vulnerable now than we have been in 80 years to the madness of crowds. Which raises the question: given an increased systemic tendency to "global groupthink", and given systemic benefits of diversity, how does one regulate the collective mind? (I don't have an answer at this time, but thought I would pose the question.)

Posted by David Lazer at 9:15 PM

24 September 2008

BCNetWORKSHOP 2008: a commemoration of the 10th anniversary of small world paper

This conference, in honor of the 10th anniversary of the Watts and Strogatz paper, might be of interest to some on this list:

BCNetWORKSHOP 2008
Physics Department, University of Barcelona, Spain, from Wednesday 10 to Friday 12 December 2008.

Important deadlines:

Early registration: 15 October 2008
Late registration: 1 December 2008
Abstract submission: 1 November 2008
Communication of accepted abstracts: 15 November 2008
Communication of final program: 1 December 2008

You can register and find further information at the website , which will be
updated and completed as the workshop proceeds.

In commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the celebrated paper by Watts and Strogatz on small-world networks, this event will bring together researchers in complex network science and related areas. Time has come to ask what have been the major contributions of this emerging field to prospect its future and open questions in perspective. To this end, internationally recognized specialists will be invited to explain their current investigations and to discuss the expected progress of their research within the context of the field. The workshop will present as well a maximum of twenty selected contributions compliant with its purpose. An open colloquium session will also be organized where keynote speakers, participants, and committee members will have the opportunity to debate all together on the present situation of complex networks science and its outlook.

We are pleased to announce the following list of keynote speakers:

Jordi Bascompte, Spanish Research Council (CSIC), Spain
Bernd Blasius, University of Oldenburg, Germany
Víctor Eguíluz, IFISC (CSIC-UIB), Spain
Roger Guimerà, Northwestern University, USA
Dmitri Krioukov, CAIDA, University of California San Diego, USA
David Lazer, Harvard University, USA
Adilson E. Motter, Northwestern University, USA
Kim Sneppen, Niels Bohr Institute, Denmark
Duncan Watts, Columbia University, USA

Posted by David Lazer at 7:02 PM

22 September 2008

Motion Sensors in Laboratories

In the last year motion sensors have been deployed at a leading academic research laboratory to study how people use space. This study has been using sensors similar to those developed by MERL, which detect when an object moves under a sensor, which are mounted to the ceiling. This does enable for limited tracking capabilities, although the sensors are placed only in "public" spaces in the lab. Naturally this is rich area for research and this study also provides a platform for studying privacy systems.

While these sensors can be used to study how people use buildings in their current state, to me the most interesting question that these sensors can fundamentally change architecture. For example, if certain room types are found to be more effective for fostering interaction, could rooms automatically alter themselves (unfurling walls, moving lights, adding chairs) to try to elicit desired behaviors? Of course this could be done manually by having someone navigate an interface, but allowing the organization itself to specify architectural parameters and have the building change from day to day by itself would be fascinating.

The data in this ongoing study is kept public (online as well as access through a public display) to members of the laboratory being studied, although not to the outside world. This is a marked departure from previous studies, which would often only release analyzed behaviors months after the study. Still, it is important for people to know who is looking at the data, since someone at the lab could potentially use the data to track someone. Interestingly, when the system was installed there was an initial minor backlash, but now that the system has been in place for so long people mostly ignore it. I have experienced this before with the badges, but I suspect this is true in e-mail monitoring and similar applications as well.

Many companies are developing this built-in sensing technology, and NEC appears to be emerging as a leader with their IR motion sensors that actually leech power from fluorescent light bulbs, allowing them to last indefinitely in the environment, versus 3 years for the MERL sensors. While this technology is still experimental, this technology should become commercialized in the next few years, either as a consulting package or a standalone sensing tool.

Posted by Ben Waber at 10:30 AM

14 September 2008

Obama's Neighbor to Neighbor tool

I have written before about the network-based foundation of Obama's campaign. Another piece of the network strategy has just emerged, in an e-mail that just went out on Obama's list regarding a new tool, called "Neighbor to Neighbor." See excerpt:

It's up to each of us to talk to voters across the country and make sure they know what this election is really about.

We have an exciting new tool called Neighbor to Neighbor that makes it easy to talk to potential supporters about Barack and the issues that matter.

Help get the conversation back on track today by making phone calls.

Nothing is more powerful than having undecided voters hear from ordinary people. And right now, that's needed more than ever.

No prior experience is required. Neighbor to Neighbor gives you a list of potential supporters, suggested topics to talk about, and an easy way to report back on who you've contacted.

With less than eight weeks until Election Day, we can't allow voters to lose focus on the big issues and get swept up by the smears and lies coming out of the McCain campaign.

Reach out to fellow voters now and grow this movement for change:

http://my.barackobama.com/n2n

This is based on a pretty strong theoretical understanding of how networks mobilize action; e.g., this is consistent with field experiments on how to increase turnout. I am not familiar with similar field experiments on how these methods affect preference (as compared to turnout). Any cites along these lines would be welcome as comments. (One wonders if campaigns conduct experiments along these lines prior to the election; this would certainly be doable, and a drop in the bucket given overall expenditures.)

This is, in any case, a striking departure from the "mobilize the base" strategies of recent years, where the objective was to get partisans to talk to each other, not partisans to undecideds. And arguably, given the apparent value of intersecting with people with different views, good for our democracy (e.g., see Diana Mutz's recent book).

I would be interested if there have been any surveys with an item like: "Have you spoken to anyone about the election, and what were their candidate preferences?" Does one see a difference in persuasion attempts by Obama as compared to McCain supporters? Are these persuasion attempts targeted at undecideds?

Posted by David Lazer at 9:27 PM

11 September 2008

Save the date: Political Networks Conference @ Harvard, June 11-13

As part of a broader effort around building research capacity on network methods in political science, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard will be sponsoring the 2009 Political Networks Conference.

We anticipate a format similar to the 2008 NIPS conference, with workshops followed by panel presentations of original work. We hope to once again bring together an interdisciplinary group of people interested in applying network methods to the study of political phenomena.

We will put out a call for papers and provide more details in January.

Posted by David Lazer at 10:55 AM

10 September 2008

Nathan Eagle to speak on "Mobile Phones in Africa: Education, Entrepreneurship, and Research

One of our bloggers, Nathan Eagle just back from Africa, will be speaking on "Mobile Phones in Africa: Education, Entrepreneurship, and Research".

The talk will take place in the Fainsod Room (3rd floor, Littauer building) at the Harvard Kennedy School 12-1:30 on September 15. A light lunch will be served.

A fuller description:

Nathan Eagle: Mobile Phones in Africa: Education, Entrepreneurship, and Research

Today's mobile phones are designed to meet Western needs. Subscribers in developing countries, however, now represent the majority of the 3 billion mobile phone users worldwide. An increasing fraction of these users live in Africa, currently the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world. I will briefly introduce three projects that have been made possible by this unprecedented technology adoption in Africa:

The EPROM initiative aims to foster an entrepreneurial mobile phone developer community within Africa. Computer Science departments within ten Sub-Saharan countries are currently teaching the EPROM curriculum. I will discuss a selection of the hundreds of mobile phone applications being designed, developed, and field-tested by the African computer science undergraduates that have taken part in the project over the last 3 years.

txteagle is a mobile crowd-sourcing application that will be launching in Kenya this October on the Safaricom network. It enables people to earn and save small amounts of money by completing simple tasks on their phones for companies who pay them either in airtime or cash.

Most recently, we are engaged in a data-sharing agreement with mobile phone operators in Rwanda and Kenya. To complement the telecommunications data we received from British Telecom in 2005 and from Viva Telecom in the Dominican Republic, we will be using the Rwandan and Kenyan anonymized data to study the dynamics of their 10 million subscribers' behavioral patterns including communication, travel, product adoption, and airtime/money transfers. http://reality.media.mit.edu

And for those of you who don't know Nathan, he is a Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. His research involves applying machine learning and network analysis techniques to large human behavioral datasets generated by mobile phones. He holds a BS and two MS degrees from Stanford University; his PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory on Reality Mining was recently declared one of the '10 technologies most likely to change the way we live' by the MIT Technology Review magazine. http://web.media.mit.edu/~nathan

Posted by David Lazer at 6:49 PM

5 September 2008

Honest Signals

Sandy Pentland has written a new book on our group's research from the past 5 years: Honest Signals. Here's a summary:

How can you know when someone is bluffing? Paying attention? Genuinely interested? The answer, writes Sandy Pentland in Honest Signals, is that subtle patterns in how we interact with other people reveal our attitudes toward them. These unconscious social signals are not just a back channel or a complement to our conscious language; they form a separate communication network. Biologically based "honest signaling," evolved from ancient primate signaling mechanisms, offers an unmatched window into our intentions, goals, and values. If we understand this ancient channel of communication, Pentland claims, we can accurately predict the outcomes of situations ranging from job interviews to first dates.

Pentland, an MIT professor, has used a specially designed digital sensor worn like an ID badge--a "sociometer"--to monitor and analyze the back-and-forth patterns of signaling among groups of people. He and his researchers found that this second channel of communication, revolving not around words but around social relations, profoundly influences major decisions in our lives--even though we are largely unaware of it. Pentland presents the scientific background necessary for understanding this form of communication, applies it to examples of group behavior in real organizations, and shows how by "reading" our social networks we can become more successful at pitching an idea, getting a job, or closing a deal. Using this "network intelligence" theory of social signaling, Pentland describes how we can harness the intelligence of our social network to become better managers, workers, and communicators.

I've read through an early edition, and in contrast to other pop science books like Freakanomics and Predictably Irrational (both of which are interesting reads), Honest Signals has the scientific details of the experiments that it talks about, in the form of a thorough 50-page appendix. For anyone interested in how sensing technology will change business and the sciences or who's interested in learning how people actually interact with each other, this is a must read.

Posted by Ben Waber at 8:48 AM