Organizations play a pivotal role in the dynamics of social, economic, and ecological systems. Current organizational life-cycle models do not adequately consider the impact of propensities (deeply ingrained preferences and patterns of behavior) on organizational culture and evolution. On a global basis, the predominant thinking modes in organizations are driven by senior executives, marketers, financial experts, legal resources, and the engineers and scientists that create our technology-rich world. Each of these groups has, in aggregate, embedded propensities or tendencies that profoundly shape decision-making patterns and overall social dynamics. Dominant propensities can make organizations vulnerable to risks by inhibiting the level of systems thinking and networking necessary to ensure integration within a global socio-ecological context. The spectrum of propensities within an organization shapes the relative resilience of its human and management systems, and ultimately determines organizational effectiveness. This paper proposes a model for organizational evolution that links the role of propensities to adaptability and resilience. Conscious effort to expand the intelligence of organizations through diversification of propensities better equips organizations to achieve adaptability and sustainability.

Information in bicycle pelotons consists of two main types: displayed information that is perceptible to others; and hidden information available to individual riders about their own physical state. Flow (or transfer) of information in pelotons occurs in two basic ways: 1) between cyclists within a peloton, which riders exploit to adjust tactical objectives (“intra-peloton”); 2) from sources outside a peloton as it is fed to riders via radio communication, or from third parties (“extra-peloton”). A conceptual framework is established for information transfer intra-peloton and extra-peloton. Both kinds of information transfer affect peloton complex dynamics. Pelotons exhibit mixed self-organized and top-down dynamics. These can be isolated and examined independently: self-organized dynamics emerge through local physical rules of interaction, and are distinguishable from the top-down dynamics of human competition, decision-making and information transfer. Both intra and extra-peloton information flow affect individual rider positions and the timing of their positional changes, but neither types of peloton information flow fundamentally alter self-organized structures. In addition to two previously identified peloton resources for which riders compete - energy saved by drafting, and near-front positions - information flow is identified as a third peloton resource. Also, building upon previous work on peloton phase-transitions and self-organized group-sorting, identified here is a transition between a team cluster state in which team-mates ride near each other, and a self-organized “fitness” cluster state in which riders of near equal fitness levels gravitate toward each other.

Understanding population wide attitude change is an important step to understanding the behavior of societies. In this talk, we will study population wide attitude change through the use of computational models. Using a model based on parallel constraint satisfaction, we will show how varying parameters, such as cognitive effort, and community structure, can impact attitude change in populations.

We present a bi-threshold model of complex contagion in networks. In this model a node in a network can be in one of two states at any time step, and changes state if enough of its neighbors are in the opposite state, as determined by “up-threshold” and “down-threshold” parameters. This dynamical process models several types of social contagion processes, such as public health concerns and the spread of games on online networks. Motivated by recent literature calling for the investigation of peer pressure to reduce obesity, which can be viewed as a control problem of population dynamics, we focus on the computational complexity of finding critical sets of nodes, which are nodes that we choose to freeze in state 0 (a desirable state) in order to inhibit the spread of an undesirable state 1 in the network. We define a minimum-cost critical set problem and show that it is NP-complete for bi-threshold systems. We show that several versions of the problem can be approximated to within a factor of O(log n), where n is the number of nodes in the network. Using the ideas behind these approximations, we devise a heuristic, called the Maximum Contributor Heuristic (MCH), which can be used even when the diffusion model is probabilistic. We perform simulations with well-known networks from the literature and show that MCH outperforms the High Degree Heuristic by several orders of magnitude.

Given the challenges of modeling multi-scale social phenomena, hybrids may hold the key to unlocking social complexity dynamics. We introduce hybrid system modeling from engineering, as a means to capture complex dynamics within interacting, multi-scale, and global social systems. Whereby hybrid modeling is used in industrial processes and automated control systems, this research uses world cup soccer tournament simulations to demonstrate successful applications. Agent-based modeling for soccer games and cellular automatons for crowd and bettor emotional reactions are modeled on each side of a playing field. A predator-prey theoretical approach is applied with self-organizing soccer teams represented as predators and the soccer ball as prey. Simulations of multiple soccer tournaments of thirty-two teams were conducted with pre-game betting and without betting as a pseudo-control measure. Tournaments conducted with pre-game betting resulted in the final tournament games having the wining team demonstrating strong defensive playing styles and scoring by a large margin. Divergence of playing styles did not develop in tournaments without pre-game betting. Hybrids offer a means to explore complexity with evolutionary learning by players, corresponding emotional reactions of spectators, and betting interacting, resulting in patterns of emergent behavior and unique evolutionary behavioral responses to complexity.

In this paper we describe a complex adaptive systems model of interactions between coupled human and natural system. We use learning classifier systems to create adaptive agents in a simulation of the Maine lobster fishery to explore the relationships among ecological, economic, and social characteristics. Our hypothesis is that the cost of information and learning drives agents' decisions to compete or co-operate and, consequently, the emergence of long-term relationships. Initial results provide tentative support for the hypothesis and the ability of this model to provide insight into the dynamics of individual interactions and the social relationships that emerge from those interactions.

This research aims to define a novel framework to employ engineering and mathematical models to study adaptive dynamics in heterarchial systems. This multi-profile descriptive platform and modeling approach is developed as a composite of conceptual behaviors and structural entity aspects of engineered complex adaptive systems (ECAS). While the US electric power system will be utilized for demonstration and validation, the framework has applicability to the general class of ECASs that are artificially created but highly interactive with natural and behavioral sciences. Conditioned on parameterization of the framework, a theorem will be presented to calibrate current structure and predict future dynamic behaviors of an ECAS. We analyze decentralized heterarchial ECASs to infer emergent behavior of the components, and evolution processes and adaptations of the whole system.

Beyond belief change and meme adoption, both genetics and infection have been spoken of in terms of information transfer. What we examine here, concentrating on the specific case of transfer between sub-networks, are the differences in network dynamics in these cases: the different network dynamics of germs, genes, and memes. Germs and memes, it turns out, exhibit a very different dynamics across networks. For infection, measured in terms of time to total infection, it is network type rather than degree of linkage between sub-networks that is of primary importance. For belief transfer, measured in terms of time to consensus, it is degree of linkage rather than network type that is crucial. Genes model each of these other dynamics in part, but match neither in full. For genetics, like belief transfer and unlike infection, network type makes little difference. Like infection and unlike belief, on the other hand, the dynamics of genetic information transfer within single and between linked networks are much the same. In ways both surprising and intriguing, transfer of genetic information seems to be robust across network differences crucial for the other two.

Millions of people globally have been forcibly displaced from their homes due to reasons beyond their control such as conflict, political upheaval, and environmental catastrophes. In many cases, these forced migrants seek temporary refuge in camps managed by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Although responsibility for refugees’ well-being within camps belongs mainly to the NGOs and host government, the density of the camp population and lack of resources of service providers leads to a high degree of insecurity. Building off successful models of mHealth, or utilizing mobile technologies to address healthcare needs, this paper explores the possibility of using communication technologies to address personal security issues. Using agent based modeling techniques, this paper examines the ways in which information about incidents of violence are communicated through a closed population. In this way, the authors advocate for the use of mobile phones in an mSecurity context that empowers forced migrants to become active members in reducing incidents of violence within refugee and internally displaced persons camps.

Broadly speaking, information has something to do with order or organization within a system of elements. The thermodynamic concept of entropy is also associated with such systems, although in an inverse relationship. When we attempt to put these two apparently coordinated schemas of order and disorder together, all kinds of difficulties arise. I will briefly examine contemporary efforts to unify these two ways of conceiving order and show that they are substantially incompatible. In this process I will draw some distinctions that will lead to a broader reconciliation of the concepts of order and information. I will then attempt to re-evaluate the fundamental models behind these dissonant traditions for formulating order in an attempt to reframe a synthesis of conceptual structures that are mutually reconcilable. I will try to show that such a synthesis can finally make sense of the stubborn inconsistencies that persist in the ways Newtonian dynamics, thermodynamics and biology utilize the implicitly conflicting arrows of time.