On some fundamental challenges in monitoring epidemics.

Epidemic models often reflect characteristic features of infectious spreading processes by coupled nonlinear differential equations considering different states of health (such as susceptible, infectious or recovered). This compartmental modelling approach, however, delivers an incomplete picture of the dynamics of epidemics, as it neglects stochastic and network effects, and the role of the measurement process, on which the estimation of epidemiological parameters and incidence values relies. In order to study the related issues, we combine established epidemiological spreading models with a measurement model of the testing process, considering the problems of false positives and false negatives as well as biased sampling. Studying a model-generated ground truth in conjunction with simulated observation processes (virtual measurements) allows one to gain insights into the fundamental limitations of purely data-driven methods when assessing the epidemic situation. We conclude that epidemic monitoring, simulation, and forecasting are wicked problems, as applying a conventional data-driven approach to a complex system with nonlinear dynamics, network effects and uncertainty can be misleading. Nevertheless, some of the errors can be corrected for, using scientific knowledge of the spreading dynamics and the measurement process. We conclude that such corrections should generally be part of epidemic monitoring, modelling and forecasting efforts. This article is part of the theme issue 'Data science approaches to infectious disease surveillance'.

Generalized network dismantling.

Finding an optimal subset of nodes in a network that is able to efficiently disrupt the functioning of a corrupt or criminal organization or contain an epidemic or the spread of misinformation is a highly relevant problem of network science. In this paper, we address the generalized network-dismantling problem, which aims at finding a set of nodes whose removal from the network results in the fragmentation of the network into subcritical network components at minimal overall cost. Compared with previous formulations, we allow the costs of node removals to take arbitrary nonnegative real values, which may depend on topological properties such as node centrality or on nontopological features such as the price or protection level of a node. Interestingly, we show that nonunit costs imply a significantly different dismantling strategy. To solve this optimization problem, we propose a method which is based on the spectral properties of a node-weighted Laplacian operator and combine it with a fine-tuning mechanism related to the weighted vertex cover problem. The proposed method is applicable to large-scale networks with millions of nodes. It outperforms current state-of-the-art methods and opens more directions for understanding the vulnerability and robustness of complex systems.

Give more data, awareness and control to individual citizens, and they will help COVID-19 containment.

The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the "phase 2" of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are being proposed for large scale adoption by many countries. A centralized approach, where data sensed by the app are all sent to a nation-wide server, raises concerns about citizens' privacy and needlessly strong digital surveillance, thus alerting us to the need to minimize personal data collection and avoiding location tracking. We advocate the conceptual advantage of a decentralized approach, where both contact and location data are collected exclusively in individual citizens' "personal data stores", to be shared separately and selectively (e.g., with a backend system, but possibly also with other citizens), voluntarily, only when the citizen has tested positive for COVID-19, and with a privacy preserving level of granularity. This approach better protects the personal sphere of citizens and affords multiple benefits: it allows for detailed information gathering for infected people in a privacy-preserving fashion; and, in turn this enables both contact tracing, and, the early detection of outbreak hotspots on more finely-granulated geographic scale. The decentralized approach is also scalable to large populations, in that only the data of positive patients need be handled at a central level. Our recommendation is two-fold. First to extend existing decentralized architectures with a light touch, in order to manage the collection of location data locally on the device, and allow the user to share spatio-temporal aggregates-if and when they want and for specific aims-with health authorities, for instance. Second, we favour a longer-term pursuit of realizing a Personal Data Store vision, giving users the opportunity to contribute to collective good in the measure they want, enhancing self-awareness, and cultivating collective efforts for rebuilding society.

Optimal incentives for collective intelligence.

Collective intelligence is the ability of a group to perform more effectively than any individual alone. Diversity among group members is a key condition for the emergence of collective intelligence, but maintaining diversity is challenging in the face of social pressure to imitate one's peers. Through an evolutionary game-theoretic model of collective prediction, we investigate the role that incentives may play in maintaining useful diversity. We show that market-based incentive systems produce herding effects, reduce information available to the group, and restrain collective intelligence. Therefore, we propose an incentive scheme that rewards accurate minority predictions and show that this produces optimal diversity and collective predictive accuracy. We conclude that real world systems should reward those who have shown accuracy when the majority opinion has been in error.

Random Deviations Improve Micro-Macro Predictions: An Empirical Test.

Many sociological theories make critically different macropredictions when their microassumptions are implemented stochastically rather than deterministically. Deviations from individuals' behavioral patterns described by microtheories can spark cascades that change macrooutcomes, even when deviations are rare and random. With two experiments, we empirically tested whether macrophenomena can be critically shaped by random deviations. Ninety-six percent of participants' decisions were in line with a deterministic theory of bounded rationality. Despite this impressive microlevel accuracy, the deterministic model failed to predict the observed macrooutcomes. However, a stochastic version of the same microtheory largely improved macropredictions. The stochastic model also correctly predicted the conditions under which deviations mattered. Results also supported the hypothesis that nonrandom deviations can result in fundamentally different macrooutcomes than random deviations. In conclusion, we echo the warning that deterministic microtheories can be misleading. Our findings show that taking into account deviations in sociological theories can improve explanations and predictions.

Globally networked risks and how to respond.

Today's strongly connected, global networks have produced highly interdependent systems that we do not understand and cannot control well. These systems are vulnerable to failure at all scales, posing serious threats to society, even when external shocks are absent. As the complexity and interaction strengths in our networked world increase, man-made systems can become unstable, creating uncontrollable situations even when decision-makers are well-skilled, have all data and technology at their disposal, and do their best. To make these systems manageable, a fundamental redesign is needed. A 'Global Systems Science' might create the required knowledge and paradigm shift in thinking.

Peer review and competition in the Art Exhibition Game.

To investigate the effect of competitive incentives under peer review, we designed a novel experimental setup called the Art Exhibition Game. We present experimental evidence of how competition introduces both positive and negative effects when creative artifacts are evaluated and selected by peer review. Competition proved to be a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it fosters innovation and product diversity, but on the other hand, it also leads to more unfair reviews and to a lower level of agreement between reviewers. Moreover, an external validation of the quality of peer reviews during the laboratory experiment, based on 23,627 online evaluations on Amazon Mechanical Turk, shows that competition does not significantly increase the level of creativity. Furthermore, the higher rejection rate under competitive conditions does not improve the average quality of published contributions, because more high-quality work is also rejected. Overall, our results could explain why many ground-breaking studies in science end up in lower-tier journals. Differences and similarities between the Art Exhibition Game and scholarly peer review are discussed and the implications for the design of new incentive systems for scientists are explained.

The rippling dynamics of valenced messages in naturalistic youth chat.

Even though human behavior is largely driven by real-time feedback from others, this social complexity is underrepresented in psychological theory, largely because it is so difficult to isolate. In this work, we performed a quasi-experimental analysis of hundreds of millions of chat room messages between young people. This allowed us to reconstruct how-and on what timeline-the valence of one message affects the valence of subsequent messages by others. For the highly emotionally valenced chat messages that we focused on, we found that these messages elicited a general increase of 0.1 to 0.4 messages per minute. This influence started 2 s after the original message and continued out to 60 s. Expanding our focus to include feedback loops-the way a speaker's chat comes back to affect him or her-we found that the stimulating effects of these same chat events started rippling back from others 8 s after the original message, to cause an increase in the speaker's chat that persisted for up to 8 min. This feedback accounted for at least 1% of the bulk of chat. Additionally, a message's valence affects its dynamics, with negative events feeding back more slowly and continuing to affect the speaker longer. By reconstructing the second-by-second dynamics of many psychosocial processes in aggregate, we captured the timescales at which they collectively ripple through a social system to drive system-level outcomes.

Assortative Matching with Inequality in Voluntary Contribution Games.

Voluntary contribution games are a classic social dilemma in which the individually dominant strategies result in a poor performance of the population. However, the negative zero-contribution predictions from these types of social dilemma situations give way to more positive (near-)efficient ones when assortativity, instead of random mixing, governs the matching process in the population. Under assortative matching, agents contribute more than what would otherwise be strategically rational in order to be matched with others doing likewise. An open question has been the robustness of such predictions when heterogeneity in budgets amongst individuals is allowed. Here, we show analytically that the consequences of permitting heterogeneity depend crucially on the exact nature of the underlying public-good provision efficacy, but generally are rather devastating. Using computational methods, we quantify the loss resulting from heterogeneity vis-a-vis the homogeneous case as a function of (i) the public-good provision efficacy and (ii) the population inequality.

Sustained cooperation by running away from bad behavior.

For cooperation to evolve, some mechanism must limit the rate at which cooperators are exposed to defectors. Only then can the advantages of mutual cooperation outweigh the costs of being exploited. Although researchers widely agree on this, they disagree intensely about which evolutionary mechanisms can explain the extraordinary cooperation exhibited by humans. Much of the controversy follows from disagreements about the informational regularity that allows cooperators to avoid defectors. Reliable information can allow cooperative individuals to avoid exploitation, but which mechanisms can sustain such a situation is a matter of considerable dispute. We conducted a behavioral experiment to see if cooperators could avoid defectors when provided with limited amounts of explicit information. We gave each participant the simple option to move away from her current neighborhood at any time. Participants were not identifiable as individuals, and they could not track each other's tendency to behave more or less cooperatively. More broadly, a participant had no information about the behavior she was likely to encounter if she moved, and so information about the risk of exploitation was extremely limited. Nonetheless, our results show that simply providing the option to move allowed cooperation to persist for a long period of time. Our results further show that movement, even though it involved considerable uncertainty, allowed would-be cooperators to assort positively and eliminate on average any individual payoff disadvantage associated with cooperation. This suggests that choosing to move, even under limited information, can completely reorganize the mix of selective forces relevant for the evolution of cooperation.

Molecular crowding creates traffic jams of kinesin motors on microtubules.

Despite the crowdedness of the interior of cells, microtubule-based motor proteins are able to deliver cargoes rapidly and reliably throughout the cytoplasm. We hypothesize that motor proteins may be adapted to operate in crowded environments by having molecular properties that prevent them from forming traffic jams. To test this hypothesis, we reconstituted high-density traffic of purified kinesin-8 motor protein, a highly processive motor with long end-residency time, along microtubules in a total internal-reflection fluorescence microscopy assay. We found that traffic jams, characterized by an abrupt increase in the density of motors with an associated abrupt decrease in motor speed, form even in the absence of other obstructing proteins. To determine the molecular properties that lead to jamming, we altered the concentration of motors, their processivity, and their rate of dissociation from microtubule ends. Traffic jams occurred when the motor density exceeded a critical value (density-induced jams) or when motor dissociation from the microtubule ends was so slow that it resulted in a pileup (bottleneck-induced jams). Through comparison of our experimental results with theoretical models and stochastic simulations, we characterized in detail under which conditions density- and bottleneck-induced traffic jams form or do not form. Our results indicate that transport kinesins, such as kinesin-1, may be evolutionarily adapted to avoid the formation of traffic jams by moving only with moderate processivity and dissociating rapidly from microtubule ends.

How simple rules determine pedestrian behavior and crowd disasters.

With the increasing size and frequency of mass events, the study of crowd disasters and the simulation of pedestrian flows have become important research areas. However, even successful modeling approaches such as those inspired by Newtonian force models are still not fully consistent with empirical observations and are sometimes hard to calibrate. Here, a cognitive science approach is proposed, which is based on behavioral heuristics. We suggest that, guided by visual information, namely the distance of obstructions in candidate lines of sight, pedestrians apply two simple cognitive procedures to adapt their walking speeds and directions. Although simpler than previous approaches, this model predicts individual trajectories and collective patterns of motion in good quantitative agreement with a large variety of empirical and experimental data. This model predicts the emergence of self-organization phenomena, such as the spontaneous formation of unidirectional lanes or stop-and-go waves. Moreover, the combination of pedestrian heuristics with body collisions generates crowd turbulence at extreme densities--a phenomenon that has been observed during recent crowd disasters. By proposing an integrated treatment of simultaneous interactions between multiple individuals, our approach overcomes limitations of current physics-inspired pair interaction models. Understanding crowd dynamics through cognitive heuristics is therefore not only crucial for a better preparation of safe mass events. It also clears the way for a more realistic modeling of collective social behaviors, in particular of human crowds and biological swarms. Furthermore, our behavioral heuristics may serve to improve the navigation of autonomous robots.

Emergence of social cohesion in a model society of greedy, mobile individuals.

Human wellbeing in modern societies relies on social cohesion, which can be characterized by high levels of cooperation and a large number of social ties. Both features, however, are frequently challenged by individual self-interest. In fact, the stability of social and economic systems can suddenly break down as the recent financial crisis and outbreaks of civil wars illustrate. To understand the conditions for the emergence and robustness of social cohesion, we simulate the creation of public goods among mobile agents, assuming that behavioral changes are determined by individual satisfaction. Specifically, we study a generalized win-stay-lose-shift learning model, which is only based on previous experience and rules out greenbeard effects that would allow individuals to guess future gains. The most noteworthy aspect of this model is that it promotes cooperation in social dilemma situations despite very low information requirements and without assuming imitation, a shadow of the future, reputation effects, signaling, or punishment. We find that moderate greediness favors social cohesion by a coevolution between cooperation and spatial organization, additionally showing that those cooperation-enforcing levels of greediness can be evolutionarily selected. However, a maladaptive trend of increasing greediness, although enhancing individuals' returns in the beginning, eventually causes cooperation and social relationships to fall apart. Our model is, therefore, expected to shed light on the long-standing problem of the emergence and stability of cooperative behavior.

How social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect.

Social groups can be remarkably smart and knowledgeable when their averaged judgements are compared with the judgements of individuals. Already Galton [Galton F (1907) Nature 75:7] found evidence that the median estimate of a group can be more accurate than estimates of experts. This wisdom of crowd effect was recently supported by examples from stock markets, political elections, and quiz shows [Surowiecki J (2004) The Wisdom of Crowds]. In contrast, we demonstrate by experimental evidence (N = 144) that even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect in simple estimation tasks. In the experiment, subjects could reconsider their response to factual questions after having received average or full information of the responses of other subjects. We compare subjects' convergence of estimates and improvements in accuracy over five consecutive estimation periods with a control condition, in which no information about others' responses was provided. Although groups are initially "wise," knowledge about estimates of others narrows the diversity of opinions to such an extent that it undermines the wisdom of crowd effect in three different ways. The "social influence effect" diminishes the diversity of the crowd without improvements of its collective error. The "range reduction effect" moves the position of the truth to peripheral regions of the range of estimates so that the crowd becomes less reliable in providing expertise for external observers. The "confidence effect" boosts individuals' confidence after convergence of their estimates despite lack of improved accuracy. Examples of the revealed mechanism range from misled elites to the recent global financial crisis.

How networks shape diversity for better or worse.

Socio-diversity, the variety of human opinions, ideas, behaviours and styles, has profound implications for social systems. While it fuels innovation, productivity and collective intelligence, it can also complicate communication and erode trust. So what mechanisms can influence it? This paper studies how fundamental characteristics of social networks can support or hinder socio-diversity. It employs models of cultural evolution, mathematical analysis and numerical simulations. We find that pronounced inequalities in the distribution of connections obstruct socio-diversity. By contrast, the prevalence of close-knit communities, a scarcity of long-range connections, and a significant tie density tend to promote it. These results open new perspectives for understanding how to change social networks to sustain more socio-diversity and, thereby, societal innovation, collective intelligence and productivity.

Experiments as Code and its application to VR studies in human-building interaction.

Experiments as Code (ExaC) is a concept for reproducible, auditable, debuggable, reusable, & scalable experiments. Experiments are a crucial tool to understand Human-Building Interactions (HBI) and build a coherent theory around it. However, a common concern for experiments is their auditability and reproducibility. Experiments are usually designed, provisioned, managed, and analyzed by diverse teams of specialists (e.g., researchers, technicians, engineers) and may require many resources (e.g., cloud infrastructure, specialized equipment). Although researchers strive to document experiments accurately, this process is often lacking. Consequently, it is difficult to reproduce these experiments. Moreover, when it is necessary to create a similar experiment, the "wheel is very often reinvented". It appears easier to start from scratch than trying to reuse existing work. Thus valuable embedded best practices and previous experiences are lost. In behavioral studies, such as in HBI, this has contributed to the reproducibility crisis. To tackle these challenges, we propose the ExaC paradigm, which not only documents the whole experiment, but additionally provides the automation code to provision, deploy, manage, and analyze the experiment. To this end, we define the ExaC concept, provide a taxonomy for the components of a practical implementation, and provide a proof of concept with an HBI desktop VR experiment that demonstrates the benefits of its "as code" representation, that is, reproducibility, auditability, debuggability, reusability, & scalability.

A virtual reality experiment to study pedestrian perception of future street scenarios.

The current allocation of street space is based on expected vehicular peak-hour flows. Flexible and adaptive use of this space can respond to changing needs. To evaluate the acceptability of flexible street layouts, several urban environments were designed and implemented in virtual reality. Participants explored these designs in immersive virtual reality in a [Formula: see text] mixed factorial experiment, in which we analysed self-reported, behavioural and physiological responses from participants. Distinct communication strategies were varied between subjects. Participants' responses reveal a preference for familiar solutions. Unconventional street layouts are less preferred, perceived as unsafe and cause a measurably greater stress response. Furthermore, information provision focusing on comparisons lead participants to focus primarily on the drawbacks, instead of the advantages of novel scenarios. When being able to freely express thoughts and opinions, participants are focused more on the impact of space design on behaviour rather than the objective physical features themselves. Especially, this last finding suggests that it is vital to develop new street scenarios in an inclusive and democratic way: the success of innovating urban spaces depends on how well the vast diversity of citizens' needs is considered and met.