The social phenomenon of familiar strangers was identified by Stanley Milgram in 1972 with a small-scale experiment. However, there has been limited research focusing on uncovering the phenomenon at a societal scale and simultaneously investigating the social relationships between familiar strangers. With the help of the large-scale mobile phone records, we empirically show the existence of the...

Collective processes such as wound re-epithelialization result from the integration of individual cellular decisions. To determine which individual cell behaviors represent the most promising targets to engineer re-epithelialization, we examined collective and individual responses of HaCaT keratinocytes seeded upon polyacrylamide gels of three stiffnesses (1, 30, and 100 kPa) and treated with a...

We investigate the collective behaviors of short-selling and margin-trading between Chinese stocks and their impacts on the co-movements of stock returns by cross-correlation and partial correlation analyses.We find that the collective behaviors ofmargin-trading are largely attributed to the index cohesive force, while those of short-selling are mainly due to some direct interactions between st...

Social norms play a pivotal role in sustaining social order by regulating individual behaviors in a society. In normative multiagent systems, social norms have been used as an efficient mechanism to govern virtual agent societies towards cooperation and coordination. In this paper, we study the emergence of social norms via learning from repeated local interactions in networked agent societies....

Existing approaches on Internet Dynamics pay more attention to the useror sessionbehaviors, but lack an overall outlook in a system level. This paper focuses on the correlation widely existing in the network and their impacts on the dynamical collective behaviors of Internet. Our simulations show that phase transition happens when the short-range interactions between two neighbor routers bring ...

We are building a system that harnesses the idle resources (cpu, storage, and bandwidth) of nodes (e.g., home desktops) distributed across the Internet to build useful distributed services like content distribution or remote backup. Users are compensated in return for contributing their nodes’ idle resources to the system. Collective managers bundle and manage the contributed resources and rese...

Artificial evolution of collective behaviors can be implemented in different ways. Here, we extend the approach of Hamann (2014). The underlying concept is that the brain is permanently trying to predict future perceptions and a state of well-being is a state that allows for precise predictions (Friston, 2010). Striving for maximal prediction success needs to be complemented by a force that imp...

The effects of an additive noise due to stochastic environmental fluctuations on robust collective behaviors in a population of oscillators with dynamical coupling are investigated. We show that an appropriate noise intensity may induce robust collective behaviors by compensating the coupling inefficiency, reducing the coupling redundance, and eliminating the sensitive dependence on initial con...

We present a set of novel design principles to aid in the development of complex collective behaviors in fleets of mobile robots. The key elements are: the use of a graph algorithm that we have created, with certain proven properties, that guarantee scalable local communications for fleets of arbitrary size; the use of artificial forces to simplify the design of motion control; the use of certa...