Model-Based Projection of Zika Infection Risk with Temperature Effect: A Case Study in Southeast Asia.

Zika virus (ZIKV) recently reemerged in the Americas and rapidly expanded in global range. It is posing significant concerns of public health due to its link to birth defects and its complicated transmission routes. Southeast Asia is badly hit by ZIKV, but limited information was found on the transmission potential of ZIKV in the region. In this paper, we develop a new dynamic process-based mathematical model, which incorporates the interactions among humans (sexual transmissibility), and between human and mosquitoes (biting transmissibility), as well as the essential impacts of temperature. The model is first validated by fitting the 2016 ZIKV outbreak in Singapore via Markov chain Monte Carlo method. Based on that, we demonstrate the effects of temperature on mosquito ecology and ZIKV transmission, and further clarify the potential risk of ZIKV outbreak in Southeast Asian countries. The results show that (i) the estimated infection reproduction number [Formula: see text] in Singapore fell from 6.93 (in which the contribution of sexual transmission was 0.89) to 0.24 after the deployment of control strategies; (ii) the optimal temperature for the reproduction of ZIKV infections and adult mosquitoes are estimated to be [Formula: see text]C and [Formula: see text]C, respectively; and (iii) the [Formula: see text] in Southeast Asia could be between 3 and 7, with an inverted-U shape around the year. The large values of [Formula: see text] and the simulative patterns of ZIKV transmission in each country highlights the high risk of ZIKV attack in Southeast Asia.

Early dengue outbreak detection modeling based on dengue incidences in Singapore during 2012 to 2017.

Dengue has been as an endemic with year-round presence in Singapore. In the recent years 2013, 2014, and 2016, there were several severe dengue outbreaks, posing serious threat to the public health. To proactively control and mitigate the disease spread, early warnings of dengue outbreaks, at which there are rapid and large-scale spread of dengue incidences, are extremely helpful. In this study, a two-step framework is proposed to predict dengue outbreaks and it is evaluated based on the dengue incidences in Singapore during 2012 to 2017. First, a generalized additive model (GAM) is trained based on the weekly dengue incidence data during 2006 to 2011. The proposed GAM is a one-week-ahead forecasting model, and it inherently accounts for the possible correlation among the historical incidence data, making the residuals approximately normally distributed. Then, an exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) control chart is proposed to sequentially monitor the weekly residuals during 2012 to 2017. Our investigation shows that the proposed two-step framework is able to give persistent signals at the early stage of the outbreaks in 2013, 2014, and 2016, which provides early alerts of outbreaks and wins time for the early interventions and the preparation of necessary public health resources. In addition, extensive simulations show that the proposed method is comparable to other potential outbreak detection methods and it is robust to the underlying data-generating mechanisms.

Bias in social interactions and emergence of extremism in complex social networks.

Emergence of extremism in social networks is among the most appealing topics of opinion dynamics in computational sociophysics in recent decades. Most of the existing studies presume that the initial existence of certain groups of opinion extremities and the intrinsic stubbornness in individuals' characteristics are the key factors allowing the tenacity or even prevalence of such extreme opinions. We propose a modification to the consensus making in bounded-confidence models where two interacting individuals holding not so different opinions tend to reach a consensus by adopting an intermediate opinion of their previous ones. We show that if individuals make biased compromises, extremism may still arise without a need of an explicit classification of extremists and their associated characteristics. With such biased consensus making, several clusters of diversified opinions are gradually formed up in a general trend of shifting toward the extreme opinions close to the two ends of the opinion range, which may allow extremism communities to emerge and moderate views to be dwindled. Furthermore, we assume stronger compromise bias near opinion extremes. It is found that such a case allows moderate opinions a greater chance to survive compared to that of the case where the bias extent is universal across the opinion space. As to the extreme opinion holders' lower tolerances toward different opinions, which arguably may exist in many real-life social systems, they significantly decrease the size of extreme opinion communities rather than helping them to prevail. Brief discussions are presented on the significance and implications of these observations in real-life social systems.

System crash as dynamics of complex networks.

Complex systems, from animal herds to human nations, sometimes crash drastically. Although the growth and evolution of systems have been extensively studied, our understanding of how systems crash is still limited. It remains rather puzzling why some systems, appearing to be doomed to fail, manage to survive for a long time whereas some other systems, which seem to be too big or too strong to fail, crash rapidly. In this contribution, we propose a network-based system dynamics model, where individual actions based on the local information accessible in their respective system structures may lead to the "peculiar" dynamics of system crash mentioned above. Extensive simulations are carried out on synthetic and real-life networks, which further reveal the interesting system evolution leading to the final crash. Applications and possible extensions of the proposed model are discussed.

Positioning, Navigation, and Book Accessing/Returning in an Autonomous Library Robot using Integrated Binocular Vision and QR Code Identification Systems.

With rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and mobile robots, some of the tedious yet simple jobs in modern libraries, like book accessing and returning (BAR) operations that had been fulfilled manually before, could be undertaken by robots. Due to the limited accuracies of the existing positioning and navigation (P&N) technologies and the operational errors accumulated within the robot P&N process, however, most of the current robots are not able to fulfill such high-precision operations. To address these practical issues, we propose, for the first time (to the best of our knowledge), to combine the binocular vision and Quick Response (QR) code identification techniques together to improve the robot P&N accuracies, and then construct an autonomous library robot for high-precision BAR operations. Specifically, the binocular vision system is used for dynamic digital map construction and autonomous P&N, as well as obstacle identification and avoiding functions, while the QR code identification technique is responsible for both robot operational error elimination and robotic arm BAR operation determination. Both simulations and experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed technique combination, as well as the constructed robot. Results show that such a technique combination is effective and robust, and could help to significantly improve the P&N and BAR operation accuracies, while reducing the BAR operation time. The implemented autonomous robot is fully-autonomous and cost-effective, and may find applications far beyond libraries with only sophisticated technologies employed.

A colored mean-field model for analyzing the effects of awareness on epidemic spreading in multiplex networks.

We study the impact of susceptible nodes' awareness on epidemic spreading in social systems, where the systems are modeled as multiplex networks coupled with an information layer and a contact layer. We develop a colored heterogeneous mean-field model taking into account the portion of the overlapping neighbors in the two layers. With theoretical analysis and numerical simulations, we derive the epidemic threshold which determines whether the epidemic can prevail in the population and find that the impacts of awareness on threshold value only depend on epidemic information being available in network nodes' overlapping neighborhood. When there is no link overlap between the two network layers, the awareness cannot help one to raise the epidemic threshold. Such an observation is different from that in a single-layer network, where the existence of awareness almost always helps.

Self-Triggered Scheduling for Boolean Control Networks.

It has been shown that self-triggered control has the ability to deal with cases with constrained resources by properly setting up the rules for updating the system control when necessary. In this article, self-triggered stabilization of the Boolean control networks (BCNs), including the deterministic BCNs, probabilistic BCNs, and Markovian switching BCNs, is first investigated via the semitensor product of matrices and the Lyapunov theory of the Boolean networks. The self-triggered mechanism with the aim to determine when the controller should be updated is provided by the decrease of the corresponding Lyapunov functions between two consecutive samplings. Rigorous theoretical analysis is presented to prove that the designed self-triggered control strategy for BCNs is well defined and can make the controlled BCNs be stabilized at the equilibrium point.

Computerized Multidomain EEG Classification System: A New Paradigm.

The recent advancements in electroencepha- logram (EEG) signals classification largely center around the domain-specific solutions that hinder the algorithm cross-discipline adaptability. This study introduces a computer-aided broad learning EEG system (CABLES) for the classification of six distinct EEG domains under a unified sequential framework. Specifically, this paper proposes three novel modules namely, complex variational mode de- composition (CVMD), ensemble optimization-based featu- res selection (EOFS), and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding-based samples reduction (tSNE-SR) methods respectively for the realization of CABLES. Extensive expe- riments are carried out on seven different datasets from diverse disciplines using different variants of the neural network, extreme learning machine, and machine learning classifiers employing a 10-fold cross-validation strategy. Results compared with existing studies reveal that the highest classification accuracy of 99.1%, 97.8%, 94.3%, 91.5%, 98.9%, 95.3%, and 92% is achieved for the motor imagery dataset A, dataset B, slow cortical potentials, epilepsy, alcoholic, and schizophrenia EEG datasets res- pectively. The overall empirical analysis authenticates that the proposed CABLES framework outperforms the existing domain-specific methods in terms of classification accuracies and multirole adaptability, thus can be endorsed as an effective automated neural rehabilitation system.

Geographical clusters of dengue outbreak in Singapore during the Covid-19 nationwide lockdown of 2020.

Dengue, a mosquito-transmitted viral disease, has posed a public health challenge to Singaporean residents over the years. In 2020, Singapore experienced an unprecedented dengue outbreak. We collected a dataset of geographical dengue clusters reported by the National Environment Agency (NEA) from 15 February to 9 July in 2020, covering the nationwide lockdown associated with Covid-19 during the period from 7 April to 1 June. NEA regularly updates the dengue clusters during which an infected person may be tagged to one cluster based on the most probable infection location (residential apartment or workplace address), which is further matched to fine-grained spatial units with an average coverage of about 1.35 km2. Such dengue cluster dataset helps not only reveal the dengue transmission patterns, but also reflect the effects of lockdown on dengue spreading dynamics. The resulting data records are released in simple formats for easy access to facilitate studies on dengue epidemics.

Stochastic quasi-synchronization of heterogeneous delayed impulsive dynamical networks via single impulsive control.

This paper investigates the quasi-synchronization problem of the stochastic heterogeneous complex dynamical networks with impulsive couplings and multiple time-varying delays. It is shown that this kind of dynamical networks can achieve exponential quasi-synchronization by exerting impulsive control added on only one chosen pinning node. By employing the Lyapunov stability theory, some sufficient criteria on quasi-synchronization for this dynamical network are established, revealing the relationship between the quasi-synchronization performance and the stochastic perturbations as well as the frequency and strength of impulsive coupling. Finally, some numerical examples are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the main results.

Target Controllability of Two-Layer Multiplex Networks Based on Network Flow Theory.

In this paper, we consider the target controllability of two-layer multiplex networks, which is an outstanding challenge faced in various real-world applications. We focus on a fundamental issue regarding how to allocate a minimum number of control sources to guarantee the controllability of each given target subset in each layer, where the external control sources are limited to interact with only one layer. It is shown that this issue is essentially a path cover problem, which is to locate a set of directed paths denoted as P and cycles denoted as C to cover the target sets under the constraint that the nodes in the second layer cannot be the starting node of any element in P , and the number of elements in P attains its minimum. In addition, the formulated path cover problem can be further converted into a maximum network flow problem, which can be efficiently solved by an algorithm called maximum flow-based target path-cover (MFTP). We rigorously prove that MFTP provides the minimum number of control sources for guaranteeing the target controllability of two-layer multiplex networks. It is anticipated that this paper would serve wide applications in target control of real-life networks.

All-optical modulation-transparent wavelength multicasting in a highly nonlinear fiber Sagnac loop mirror.

An all-optical wavelength multicasting scheme using four-wave mixing (FWM) in a highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF) Sagnac loop mirror has been demonstrated. This proposed scheme has the advantage that even when the wavelength of a multicast channel overlaps with the pump-pump generated idler, clear eye diagram can still be observed. Six and ten 10-Gb/s multicast channels, compliant with the ITU grid, are successfully obtained by using two- and three-pump lasers, respectively. Multicasting of on-off shift keying (OOK) and differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) signals are both successfully demonstrated. The maximum power penalty of the multicast channels is less than 3.5 dB. Furthermore, compared with the non-loop configuration, up to 1.2 dB power penalty improvement can be achieved in this proposed Sagnac loop configuration.

Quasi-Synchronization of Heterogeneous Networks With a Generalized Markovian Topology and Event-Triggered Communication.

We consider the quasi-synchronization problem of a continuous time generalized Markovian switching heterogeneous network with time-varying connectivity, using pinned nodes that are event-triggered to reduce the frequency of controller updates and internode communications. We propose a pinning strategy algorithm to determine how many and which nodes should be pinned in the network. Based on the assumption that a network has limited control efficiency, we derive a criterion for stability, which relates the pinning feedback gains, the coupling strength, and the inner coupling matrix. By utilizing the stochastic Lyapunov stability analysis, we obtain sufficient conditions for exponential quasi-synchronization under our stochastic event-triggering mechanism, and a bound for the quasi-synchronization error. Numerical simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.

Dynamics of opinion formation under majority rules on complex social networks.

We study opinion dynamics on complex social networks where each individual holding a binary opinion on a certain subject may change her/his mind to match the opinion of the majority. Two rules of interactions between individuals, termed as classic majority and influence majority rules, respectively, are imposed on the social networks. The former rule allows each individual to adopt an opinion following a simple majority of her/his immediate neighbors, while the latter one lets each individual calculate the influence of each opinion and choose to follow the more influential one. In this calculation, the influences of different opinions are counted as the sum of the influences of their respective opinion holders in neighborhood area, where the influence of each individual is conveniently estimated as the number of social connections s/he has. Our study reveals that in densely-connected social networks, all individuals tend to converge to having a single global consensus. In sparsely-connected networks, however, the systems may exhibit rich properties where coexistence of different opinions, and more interestingly, multiple steady states of coexistence can be observed. Further studies reveal that low-degree and high-degree nodes may play different roles in formulating the final steady state, including multi-steady states, of the systems under different opinion evolution rules. Such observations would help understand the complex dynamics of opinion evolution and coexistence in social systems.

Asymmetric interdependent networks with multiple-dependence relation.

In this paper, we study the robustness of interdependent networks with multiple-dependence (MD) relation which is defined that a node is interdependent on several nodes on another layer, and this node will fail if any of these dependent nodes are failed. We propose a two-layered asymmetric interdependent network (AIN) model to address this problem, where the asymmetric feature is that nodes in one layer may be dependent on more than one node in the other layer with MD relation, while nodes in the other layer are dependent on exactly one node in this layer. We show that in this model the layer where nodes are allowed to have MD relation exhibits different types of phase transitions (discontinuous and hybrid), while the other layer only presents discontinuous phase transition. A heuristic theory based on message-passing approach is developed to understand the structural feature of interdependent networks and an intuitive picture for the emergence of a tricritical point is provided. Moreover, we study the correlation between the intralayer degree and interlayer degree of the nodes and find that this correlation has prominent impact to the continuous phase transition but has feeble effect on the discontinuous phase transition. Furthermore, we extend the two-layered AIN model to general multilayered AIN, and the percolation behaviors and properties of relevant phase transitions are elaborated.

Information Cascades and the Collapse of Cooperation.

In various types of structured communities newcomers choose their interaction partners by selecting a role-model and copying their social networks. Participants in these networks may be cooperators who contribute to the prosperity of the community, or cheaters who do not and simply exploit the cooperators. For newcomers it is beneficial to interact with cooperators but detrimental to interact with cheaters. However, cheaters and cooperators usually cannot be identified unambiguously and newcomers' decisions are often based on a combination of private and public information. We use evolutionary game theory and dynamical networks to demonstrate how the specificity and sensitivity of those decisions can dramatically affect the resilience of cooperation in the community. We show that promiscuous decisions (high sensitivity, low specificity) are advantageous for cooperation when the strength of competition is weak; however, if competition is strong then the best decisions for cooperation are risk-adverse (low sensitivity, high specificity). Opportune decisions based on private and public information can still support cooperation but suffer of the presence of information cascades that damage cooperation, especially in the case of strong competition. Our research sheds light on the way the interplay of specificity and sensitivity in individual decision-making affects the resilience of cooperation in dynamical structured communities.

High-precision tracking differentiator via generalized discrete-time optimal control.

An enhanced discrete-time tracking differentiator (TD) with high precision based on discrete-time optimal control (DTOC) law is proposed. This law takes the form of state feedback for a double-integral system that adopts the Isochronic Region approach. There, the control signal sequence is determined by a linearized criterion based on the position of the initial state point on the phase plane. The proposed control law can be easily extended to the TD design problem by combining the first-state variable of the double-integral system with the desired trajectory. To improve the precision of the discretization model, we introduced a zero-order hold on the control signal. We also discuss the general form of DTOC law by analysing the relationship between boundary transformations and boundary characteristic points. After comparing the simulation results from three different TDs, we determined that this new TD achieves better performance and higher precision in signal-tracking filtering and differentiation acquisition than do existing TDs. Also the comparisons of the computational complexities between the proposed DTOC law and normal one are demonstrated. For confirmation of its utility, we processed raw phasor measurement units data via the proposed TD. In the absence of complex power system modelling and historical data, it was verified that the proposed TD is suitable for applications of real-time synchrophasor estimations, especially when the states are corrupted by noise.

Crash dynamics of interdependent networks.

The emergence and evolution of real-world systems have been extensively studied in the last few years. However, equally important phenomena are related to the dynamics of systems' collapse, which has been less explored, especially when they can be cast into interdependent systems. In this paper, we develop a dynamical model that allows scrutinizing the collapse of systems composed of two interdependent networks. Specifically, we explore the dynamics of the system's collapse under two scenarios: in the first one, the condition for failure should be satisfied for the focal node as well as for its corresponding node in the other network; while in the second one, it is enough that failure of one of the nodes occurs in either of the two networks. We report extensive numerical simulations of the dynamics performed in different setups of interdependent networks, and analyze how the system behavior depends on the previous scenarios as well as on the topology of the interdependent system. Our results can provide valuable insights into the crashing dynamics and evolutionary properties of interdependent complex systems.

Matrix function optimization under weighted boundary constraints and its applications in network control.

The matrix function optimization under weighted boundary constraints on the matrix variables is investigated in this work. An "index-notation-arrangement based chain rule" (I-Chain rule) is introduced to obtain the gradient of a matrix function. By doing this, we propose the weighted trace-constraint-based projected gradient method (WTPGM) and weighted orthornormal-constraint-based projected gradient method (WOPGM) to locate a point of minimum of an objective/cost function of matrix variables iteratively subject to weighted trace constraint and weighted orthonormal constraint, respectively. New techniques are implemented to establish the convergence property of both algorithms. In addition, compared with the existing scheme termed "orthornormal-constraint-based projected gradient method" (OPGM) that requires the gradient has to be represented by the multiplication of a symmetrical matrix and the matrix variable itself, such a condition has been relaxed in WOPGM. Simulation results show the effectiveness of our methods not only in network control but also in other learning problems. We believe that the results reveal interesting physical insights in the field of network control and allow extensive applications of matrix function optimization problems in science and engineering.

Enabling Controlling Complex Networks with Local Topological Information.

Complex networks characterize the nature of internal/external interactions in real-world systems including social, economic, biological, ecological, and technological networks. Two issues keep as obstacles to fulfilling control of large-scale networks: structural controllability which describes the ability to guide a dynamical system from any initial state to any desired final state in finite time, with a suitable choice of inputs; and optimal control, which is a typical control approach to minimize the cost for driving the network to a predefined state with a given number of control inputs. For large complex networks without global information of network topology, both problems remain essentially open. Here we combine graph theory and control theory for tackling the two problems in one go, using only local network topology information. For the structural controllability problem, a distributed local-game matching method is proposed, where every node plays a simple Bayesian game with local information and local interactions with adjacent nodes, ensuring a suboptimal solution at a linear complexity. Starring from any structural controllability solution, a minimizing longest control path method can efficiently reach a good solution for the optimal control in large networks. Our results provide solutions for distributed complex network control and demonstrate a way to link the structural controllability and optimal control together.