TUTORS & PROJECT

ALBERTO ALETA

University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain

TITLE
The viability of using white worms as an active defense mechanism against botnets
ABSTRACT
Classical cyber defense mechanisms are not well suited for some of the threats that we can find nowadays. For instance, IoT devices tend to be poorly secured, making them the perfect target for malware and the creation of large-scale botnets. There have been recent proposals to leverage the weaknesses of IoT devices by using white worms to gain control of them and fix their vulnerabilities. However, besides the ethical concerns that this activity may raise, is it a viable strategy? Under which conditions? These questions will be addressed using models of epidemic-spreading processes with competing pathogens both from a theoretical and a numerical point of view.

ELSA ARCAUTE

UCL, London, UK

TITLE 
The role of proximity for knowledge spillovers in patent citations
ABSTRACT 
Innovation is an essential process in cities, which is nevertheless, very difficult to capture or to measure. There is no simple or universal answer to the questions of 1) what is an innovation, and 2) what are the mechanisms that gave rise to it. Insights to these questions are essential to create the right conditions for the drivers to emerge. The most common proxy for innovation, mainly related to the domain of science and technology, is a patent. Although this can be considered as a poor proxy for many different reasons that we will discuss, it captures to some extent a process of intervening fields or domains that gave rise to the patented innovation. The reference system when patenting is responsible for this: patents need to make reference to other patents that are thought to be essential contributors to the conception of this innovation. In this workshop we will analyse patent data from 1977 to 2019, and identify the influence of industries on each other for the patenting process in the UK. We will look at whether proximity and similarity of industries play an important role in the spillover of knowledge, and whether this has changed over time.

JUAN FERNANDEZ-GRACIA

IFISC, Palma de Mallorca, Spain

TITLE
Analysis and modeling of temporal patterns in communication: beyond pairwise interactions
ABSTRACT
Many human activities follow temporal patterns that have several interesting characteristics. On the one hand there are temporal regularities that arise (yearly, monthly, weekly, daily). On the other hand many activities occur in bursts, having long periods of inactivity followed by clusters of many events. When talking about
communication activities all these characteristics are observable, but also the appearance of communication networks. How do the communication networks form and evolve in time taking into account burstiness, periodic patterns and mesoscopic characteristics of the network such as cascades and formation of
communities will be the central topic for the project. It will consist of two parts, the first centered on the analysis of communication data; and the second one on the modeling of the observed patterns.

ALESSANDRO GALEAZZI

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy

TITLE 
Analyzing the Relationship between Echo Chambers and Content Engagement on Twitter
ABSTRACT
The goal of this project is to study the relationship between content engagement and echo chambers on Twitter. Echo chambers have been shown to contribute to the polarization of online environments, and platform algorithms may exacerbate this issue by limiting users' exposure to differing opinions and increasing segregation. While previous research on echo chambers on Twitter has focused on users' interactions, this project aims to go further by also considering the overall attention generated by a piece of
content and how it relates to the echo chamber it belongs to. This project aims to utilize the "view count" feature on Twitter to compare the number of active users within echo chambers to the outreach of the content. This will allow for an investigation into whether there is any algorithmic bias in favor of one side of the debate. By comparing the number of users actively engaging with content within echo chambers and the overall reach of
that content, this project aims to gain a better understanding of the dynamics at play within these online communities and how they are influenced by platform algorithms. Additionally, this study will compare the results obtained through this method to those
obtained by state-of-the-art models simulating online dynamics, in order to estimate the number of users who view content but do not interact with it. To conduct this research, Twitter data on a heated topic (e.g. politics, vaccines) and information on source reliability
(e.g. classifications from allsides.com, MediaBiasFactCheck.com) will be needed.

the anH han

Teesside University, Middlesbrough, England, UK

TITLE
Evolutionary dynamics and cooperation in hybrid human-AI populations 
ABSTRACT
Cooperation, in which agents seek ways to jointly improve their welfare, is ubiquitous in human societies. Arguably, the success of the human species is rooted in our ability to cooperate. Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT) has been used to mathematically study the mechanisms which lead to the emergence and evolution of cooperative behaviours in human societies with diverse behavioural strategies in co-presence. Their systematic study also resorts to agent-based modelling and simulation techniques, thus enabling the exploration of aforesaid mechanisms under a variety of conditions and application domains.
However, similar issues in the context of hybrid mixed populations of humans and artificial intelligence (AI) agents have begun to amass attention only very recently. Since machines powered by artificial intelligence or AI agents are playing an increasingly more important role in our lives, it will be important to equip them with the capabilities necessary to cooperate and to foster cooperation. This project will design EGT models to study the emergence and stability of cooperation behaviours in hybrid human-AI populations where human and AI agents exist in co-presence, interact with each other, and evolve over time. This project will explore new factors that might arise in this hybrid setting (e.g. how AI agents learn socially or individually, process information and update behaviours differently from humans) and design EGT models to explore how they might influence the population dynamics and cooperative outcomes.

GIULIA PULLANO

Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

TITLE
How recurrent human activities are affected by global crisis
ABSTRACT
In the last decades, behavioral data, mostly from geolocated mobile phone records, has enabled researchers to quantitatively study individual and collective human behaviors to capture and reproduce regularities in spatio-temporal mobility and social structures and any local anomalies. Such high-resolution data have been
used to predict how infectious diseases spread, to characterize social segregation, or to respond to extreme events such as earthquakes, wildfires, and hurricanes. Over the past 20 months, however, our world has become arrested by the surges caused by SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19. With each surge, there are disruptions to routine life through school closures, reductions in leisure activities, and adaptive human behavior (e.g., self-isolation, avoidance of indoor activities, and preferences to keep outdoor venues for gatherings like conferences, sports, and religious
events) [3,4]. COVID-19 surges and the interconnected behavioral aspects alter the recurrent habits of humans. Additionally, environmental and climate changes have a key role in changing daily indoor and outdoor human activities. The combination of these factors makes human behavior extremely difficult to predict.
To help fight the pandemic, however, network operators such as Orange, Vodafone, and Telefonica and companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Cuebiq, SafeGraph, and Unacast made a huge effort to quickly share their aggregated behavioral data in real-time at large scale and fine resolution. Many challenges have arisen as
a result of this unprecedented data sharing phenomenon. Novel methodological frameworks to pool such empirical data for crisis management are needed. This project will use fine-scale behavioral data from SafeGraph to characterize short- and long-term changes in human activity in a pandemic scenario. Using time series and clustering analysis, we will quantify activity in indoor versus outdoor environments in the United States at 5 million locations nationwide from 2019 to 2022. Developing a SEIR compartmental model for respiratory COVID-like diseases, we will also provide a parameterization of real-time behavior that can be included in infectious disease dynamics models to better predict epidemic activity.

ENRICO SER-GIACOMI

IFISC, Palma de Mallorca, Spain

TITLE 
Temporal and intermittent features of ocean fluid transport from a network perspective and potential implications for marine ecology 
ABSTRACT 
Transport, dispersion and mixing of water masses play a fundamental role in several physical and biological processes happening within the oceanic environment. Due to the intrinsic temporal variability of ocean currents, fluid transport patterns can present a marked time dependence across a wide range of scales, from days to years. We propose to assess such temporal features of the ocean using a network approach in which different locations of the ocean are associated with the network nodes while links weights are proportional to the amount of fluid exchanged between node pairs. We focus on sets of snapshot networks (already available) representing oceanic transport across different time windows. Network theory methods will be then used to define and characterize the proprieties of the temporal networks derived from such sets of snapshots. Finally, related aspects of marine ecology, such as gene flow and metapopulation dynamics, will be discussed and possibly investigated.

VENUE

Palma de Mallorca, Spain

Complexity72h will be held in Palma De Mallorca for the 2023 Edition! Welcome to the capital of Maiorca, famous for its cathedral, its Old City and most of all, its amazing beaches.

Please write us for any information on travel logistics to reach the workshop. We will be glad to help you.

IFISC

The IFISC (Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems) will host the workshop and its participants.

About IFISC: link

Wifi will be provided in all areas via eduroam.

Find IFISC on MAPS

Transportation

Airport
Palma de Mallorca is very well connected with the rest of Spain and Europe (specially Germany, UK, Austria, Switzerland and Scandinavia) through the International "Son Sant Joan" airport (airport code PMI). The airport is located 8 km east of Palma.

How to go from Palma Airport to Palma downtown

Bus: At the Airport take the line A1 at bus stop 547 located outside the Arrivals' Hall. There is a bus every 15-20 minutes. Ticket price: 5€. Tickets can be purchased from the bus driver (only bills up to 10 EUR are accepted).  Step down at stop 2 "Plaza España" or "Plaça d'Espanya", where you can take a connection to the UIB campus.

Taxi: Alternatively you can take a Taxi from the Airport to Palma or to the UIB campus. Taxis can be found just outside the Airport Arrivals Hall. Typical fares are around 25€-30€ depending on trafic and number of suitcases. The are suplemental fares for night and holiday services.

How to go from Palma downtown to the UIB campus

Metro (subway)
: Take line M1  which starts at Plaza España (marked as Estació Intermodal in ticket machines) and ends at the UIB campus. Travel time is 13 min. There is a metro every 20 min. Single ticket price is 1.80€. Tickets can be purchased at the ticket machines located in the station hall (bills larger than 20€ are not accepted). Keep the ticket until the end, since it is needed to leave the station. Line M1 does not operates on Sundays nor on Saturdays after 2:30 pm.

Bus: From Monday to Friday, take  line 19  (labelled as "Universitat"). Single ticket price is 2€. Tickets can be purchased from the bus driver (only bills up to 10 EUR are accepted). Bus frequency is about one every 15 min. and trip time is about 30 min.  Line 19 has several stops in Palma including Plaça d'Espanya. For the Student Residence use stop 1101, when arriving from Palma and 1102 when going to Palma. Both stops are labelled "C.Esport-Residència". For IFISC or Antoni M. Alcover building, use stop  571, "Edifici Beatriu de Pinós", when arriving from Palma and stop 1014, "C. Mallorca" (located in front of the Antoni M. Alcover building), when going to Palma. On weekends use line 9 . Bus frequency is about one every hour. When arriving from or going to Palma use bus stop 1101 for Student Residence and stop 1014 for IFISC and Antoni M. Alcover buildings.

ORGANIZERS

ALBERTO ANTONIONI

Alberto is a mathematician working on evolutionary game theory and experimental economics. He is now an assistant professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

WEBSITE

SOFIA TEXEIRA

Sofia develops measures and computational models to understand the evolution of complex systems. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Informatics at Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa.

WEBSITE

MADDALENA TORRICELLI

Maddalena is a researcher based at City, University of London with a background in computational social science and networks. 

WEBSITE

EUGENIO VALDANO

Eugenio is a researcher at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) in Paris, France. He is an infectious disease epidemiologist with a background in theoretical physics. He works in infectious disease modeling. His research currently focuses on HIV, COVID-19, and the impact of climate change on the spread of infectious disease epidemics.

WEBSITE

LOCAL ORGANIZERS

PERE COLET

WEBSITE

JOSE RAMASCO

WEBSITE

SUPPORTERS