General Assembly European Research Group S4

Prof. Denise PUMAIN, Prof. Stephane JOOST, Dr Christian KAISER, Prof. Jean-Paul FERRIER, Prof. Jean-Bernard RACINE, Prof. Micheline COSINSCHI

Prof. David LANE, University of Modena & Reggio Emilia, Italy. For a long time, the idea of novelty was generally regarded with great suspicion; in the last few centuries, it is increasingly viewed in a favourable light, so much so that it seems appropriate to characterize the developed and developing world in the last few decades as "The Innovation Society". In this talk, I describe some aspects of social, technological, economic and cultural innovation processes, particularly those that...

Prof. Lena SANDERS, CNRS, Paris, France. Cities evolve at different rhythms, some growing, other stagnating or even declining. The hypothesis is that these differences are the result of different abilities to valorise a position in a system of cities. The interactions between cities play then a driving role in their evolution. First I will briefly present a family of models based on that principle, the SimPop models. Then I will use particular one, the EuroSim model which concerns the...

Prof. Peter ALLEN, Cranfield University, United Kingdom. Many spatial models are really ‘fitted descriptions’ of spatial changes that have occurred. In order to have a deeper and possibly more long term understanding of what is going on, or may happen, it is necessary to represent the behaviours, interactions and circumstances of the different agents within the system and to explore not only how their locations and size may change, but also how their activities, technologies, needs and...

Prof. Stefano BATTISTON, System Design, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. We propose a novel trust metric for social networks which is suitable for application to recommender systems. It is personalised and dynamic, and allows to compute the indirect trust between two agents which are not neighbours based on the direct trust between agents that are neighbours. In analogy to some personalised versions of PageRank, this metric makes use of the concept of feedback centrality and overcomes some of the...

Prof. Gerard WEISBUCH, Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris, France. We discuss the possible World patterns of economic activity after the transition to a sustainable and stationary economy. Our main concern is the economy of energy, most probably the limiting factor of economic development. Should we expect a strongly contrasted world with of economic activity after one or several economically active regions as nowadays? Or a more equitable repartition of wealth and economic activity? We here...

Prof. Itzhak BENENSON, Geography, University of Tel-Aviv, Israel. Geosimulation treats the city as a creature, the complexity of which is above the complexity of physical and chemical systems, but below the complexity of a human self. It thus assumes that there is no need to directly account for real complexity of urban inanimate and animate objects when formalizing urban phenomena. Instead, we could succeed with the agents, which exhibit simple human-like activities that drive the city and...

Prof. Marco TOMASSINI, ISI, University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Game theory offers a simplified but powerful metaphor of social behavior and decision processes under conflicting situations. We shall introduce some of these paradigms in the language of game theory and show that often they lead to social dilemmas and do not fully correspond to the observed human behavior. We shall see that the introduction of the more biological inspired evolutionary game theory brings some relief into the...

Prof. Roger GUIMERA & Prof. Marta SALES, Biochimics, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain. Cells, the brain, ecosystems and economies are complex systems. In complex systems, individual components interact with each other, usually in nonlinear ways, giving rise to complex networks of interactions that are neither totally regular nor totally random. Partly because of the interactions themselves and partly because of the interaction topology, complex systems cannot be properly...

Prof. Noshir CONTRACTOR, Northwestern University, SONIC, USA. Recent advances in Web Science provide comprehensive digital traces of social actions, interactions, and transactions. These data provide an unprecedented exploratorium to model the socio-technical motivations for creating, maintaining, dissolving, and reconstituting multidimensional social networks. Multidimensional networks include multiple types of nodes (people, documents, datasets, tags, etc.) and multiple types of...

Céline ROZENBLAT, Institut de géographie, UNIL