Formation control is an important sub-problem in multi-agent robotics and a number of decentralized control strategies have been developed to solve the formation control problem, e.g., [1], [2], [3]. However, there is still no underlying theory that governs the selection of a particular formation. In other words, if an agent has a choice between two formations, which one should it choose? In th...

Social proverbs contain life philosophies and experience as well as moral standards; aspects of social life are reflected in the mirror of social proverbs. Social proverbs are of both language and culture. Because of their abundant cultural information, social proverbs have been studied from the point of culture in many researches. Modern semiotics has been widely applied to cultural studies as...

Online communities exist in many forms and sizes, and are a source of considerable influence for individuals and organizations (1, 2). Yet, there is limited insight into why some online communities are sustainable, while others cease to exist (3). We find that communities that fail to maintain a typical hierarchical social structure which balances cohesiveness across size scales do not survive,...

With the extreme popularity of online social networks, security and privacy issues become critical. In particular, it is important to protect user privacy without preventing them from normal socialization. User privacy in the context of data publishing and structural re-identification attacks has been well studied. However, protection of attributes and data content was mostly neglected in the r...

Debt-induced crises, including the subprime, are usually attributed exclusively to supply-side factors. We examine the role of social influences on debt culture, emanating from perceived average income of peers. Utilizing unique information from a household survey representative of the Dutch population, that circumvents the issue of defining the social circle, we consider collateralized, consum...