arXiv subjects

Lucia Russo

Publications and source records attributed to Lucia Russo.

21 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Modelling Lobbying Behaviour and Interdisciplinarity Dynamics in Academia

Disciplinary diversity is being recognized today as the key to establish a vibrant academic environment with bigger potential for breakthroughs in research and technology. However, the interaction of several factors including policies, and behavioral attitudes put significant barriers on advancing interdisciplinarity. A "cognitive rigidity" may rise due to reactive academic lobbying favouring inbreeding. Here, we address, analyse and discuss a mathematical model of lobbying and interdisciplinarity dynamics in Academia. The model consists of four coupled non-linear Ordinary Differential Equations simulating the interaction between three types of academic individuals and a state reflecting the rate of knowledge advancement which is related to the level of disciplinary diversity. Our model predicts a rich nonlinear behaviour including multiplicity of states and sustained periodic oscillations resembling the everlasting struggle between the "new" and the "old". The effect of a control policy that inhibits lobbying is also studied. By appropriate adjustment of the model parameters we approximated the jump/phase transitions in breakthroughs in mathematical and molecular biological sciences resulted by the increased flow of Russian scientists in the USA after the dissolution of the Soviet Union starting in 1989, the launch of the Human Genome Project in 1992 and the Internet diffusion starting in 2000.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2015

A complex network theory approach for the spatial distribution of fire breaks in heterogeneous forest landscapes for the control of wildland fires

Based on complex network theory, we propose a computational methodology that addresses the spatial distribution of fuel breaks for the inhibition of the spread and size of wildland fires on heterogeneous landscapes. This is a two-tire approach where the dynamics of fire spread are modeled as a random Markov field process on a directed network whose edge weights, are provided by a state-of-the-art cellular automata model that integrates detailed GIS, landscape and meteorological data. Within this framework, the spatial distribution of fuel breaks is reduced to the problem of finding the network nodes among which the fire spreads faster, thus their removal favours the inhibition of the fire propagation. Here this is accomplished exploiting the information centrality statistics. We illustrate the proposed approach through (a) an artificial forest of randomly distributed density of vegetation, and (b) a real-world case concerning the island of Rhodes in Greece whose a major part of its forest burned in 2008. Simulation results show that the methodology outperforms significantly the benchmark tactic of random distribution of fuel breaks.

nlin.CG↗

arXiv2013

Can social microblogging be used to forecast intraday exchange rates?

The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) is widely accepted to hold true under certain assumptions. One of its implications is that the prediction of stock prices at least in the short run cannot outperform the random walk model. Yet, recently many studies stressing the psychological and social dimension of financial behavior have challenged the validity of the EMH. Towards this aim, over the last few years, internet-based communication platforms and search engines have been used to extract early indicators of social and economic trends. Here, we used Twitter's social networking platform to model and forecast the EUR/USD exchange rate in a high-frequency intradaily trading scale. Using time series and trading simulations analysis, we provide some evidence that the information provided in social microblogging platforms such as Twitter can in certain cases enhance the forecasting efficiency regarding the very short (intradaily) forex.

cs.SI↗