arXiv subjects

Eoin O'Sullivan

Publications and source records attributed to Eoin O'Sullivan.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

People, Places & Things: Network topology & motifs of R&D missions

Challenge-led R and D programs increasingly assemble heterogeneous people, organizations, funders, projects, and technical outputs around defined missions. Yet program evaluation often describes these systems through project lists, output counts, or retrospective case narratives. This article develops a typed network framework for representing R and D program architecture directly. We model programs as networks of people, places, and things: researchers, program directors, institutions, funders, publications, patents, projects, and citations. Applied to ARPA-E project impact sheets from the agency's first decade, the framework reconstructs 23 program-induced networks and an agency-level composed network. We show that R and D programs have an analysable topology: a typed arrangement of people, institutions, funders, projects, publications, patents, and citations that can be reconstructed, compared, and monitored. The analysis shows that programs can be compared by their local structural patterns, that cross-program overlap is concentrated more in recurring institutions than in individual researchers, and that program fingerprints differ across thematic areas. The article contributes to network science by extending topological analysis to R and D program systems, a class of governed, typed, and output-generating networks that has not been systematically represented in existing innovation-network work.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2023

Morphology of Vaccine RD&D translation

Translation as a concept coordinates participation in innovation but remains a qualitative construct. We provide multivariate accounting of linkages between market entries of vaccines, clinical trials, patents, publications, funders, and grants to quantify biomedical translation. We found that the most prevalent types of biomedical translation are those between basic and applied research (52 percent) followed by those between research and product development (36 percent). Although many biomedical stakeholders assume knowledge flows one way from upstream research to downstream application, knowledge feedbacks that mediate translation are prevalent. We also cluster biomedical funders based on the types of translations they fund. Large-scale funding agencies such as NIH are similarly involved in early-stage translation, whereas pharmaceuticals and mission-oriented agencies such as DARPA involve diverse translation types, and each leaves different translation footprints.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2023

Rate-Induced Tipping to Metastable Zombie Fires

Zombie fires in peatlands disappear from the surface, smoulder underground during the winter, and `come back to life' in the spring. They can release hundreds of megatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere per year and are believed to be caused by surface wildfires. Here, we propose rate-induced tipping (R-tipping) to a subsurface hot metastable state in bioactive peat soils as a main cause of Zombie fires. Our hypothesis is based on a conceptual soil-carbon model subjected to realistic changes in weather and climate patterns, including global warming scenarios and summer heatwaves. Mathematically speaking, R-tipping to the hot metastable state is a nonautonomous instability, due to crossing an elusive quasithreshold, in a multiple-timescale dynamical system. To explain this instability, we provide a framework combining a special compactification technique with concepts from geometric singular perturbation theory. This framework allows us to reduce an R-tipping problem due to crossing a quasithreshold to a heteroclinic orbit problem in a singular limit. We identify generic cases of tracking-tipping transitions via: (i) unfolding of a codimension-two heteroclinic folded saddle-node type-I singularity for global warming, and (ii) analysis of a codimension-one saddle-to-saddle hetroclinic orbit for summer heatwaves, in turn revealing new types of excitability quasithresholds.

math.DS↗

arXiv2023

Order in Innovation

Is calendar time the true clock of innovation? By combining complexity science with innovation economics and using vaccine datasets containing over three million citations and eight regulatory authorisations, we discover that calendar time and network order describe innovation progress at varying accuracy. First, we present a method to establish a mathematical link between technological evolution and complex networks. The result is a path of events that narrates innovation bottlenecks. Next, we quantify the position and proximity of documents to these innovation paths and find that research, by and large, proceed from basic research, applied research, development, to commercialisation. By extension, we are able to causally quantify the participation of innovation funders. When it comes to vaccine innovation, diffusion-oriented entities are preoccupied with basic, later-stage research; biopharmaceuticals tend to participate in applied development activities and clinical trials at the later-stage; while mission-oriented entities tend to initiate early-stage research. Future innovation programs and funding allocations would benefit from better understanding innovation orders.

physics.soc-ph↗