The Los Angeles riot in the spring of 1992 remains an ever-haunting example of the destructive manner in which some individuals handle social rage. While understanding some of the myriad of reasons for social rage could help address the psychological nature of such a problem, this work focuses on developing a model of the physical interactions that may precipitate a riot. In particular, an agen...

Traditional tools for configuring cloud services can runmuch slower than the workflows they are trying to optimize. For example, in the case studies reported here, we find cases where (using traditional methods) it takes hours to find ways to make a workflow terminate in tens of seconds. Such slow optimizers are a poor choice of tools for reacting to changing operational environmental condition...

We present a qualitative study of governance in the community of League of Legends, a popular Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game developed by Riot Games. To cope with toxic behaviors such as griefing and flaming, Riot Games initially implemented a crowdsourcing system inviting players to participate in governing their own community. However, in May, 2014, they automated the system, rel...

This paper presents a novel communication model to simulate various crowd behaviors such as riot. Our communication model is heavily based on the results from sociology research. Collective behaviors can emerge out of social processes such as emotion contagion and conformity effect among individual agents. The communication model has been implemented in our crowd simulation system, IMCrowd, in ...

In crises and disasters, social media not only facilitates mobilization, sharing of critical information, but also enables people to watch and participate as the crisis unfolds. Participation is now much more open to those beyond the immediately affected: the victims, the rescue workers and other stakeholders. This paper reports on a study of tweets collected during and after a rare occurrence ...