arXiv subjects

Xian Gong

Publications and source records attributed to Xian Gong.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The economics of global personality diversity

This study explores the relationship between personality diversity and national economic performance, introducing the Global Personality Diversity Index ($Ψ$-GPDI) as a novel metric. Leveraging a dataset of 760,242 individuals across 135 countries, we quantify within-country diversity based on the Big Five personality traits. Our findings reveal that personality diversity accounts for 19.9% of the variance in GDP per person employed and provides an additional 5.7% explanatory power beyond institutional quality and immigrant diversity, underscoring its unique contribution to economic vitality. Through multi-factor analysis, we demonstrate how personality diversity complements existing economic frameworks, offering actionable insights for policymakers seeking to enhance innovation, productivity, and resilience. This research positions psychological diversity as a critical yet under explored factor in driving economic growth, bridging the fields of psychology and economics.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2026

Translation Readiness Index: Measuring the Semantic Proximity of Research to Patented Science

Universities, funders, and investors often need to spot research with translational potential early, long before downstream outcomes like licenses, startups, or patents emerge. We introduce the Translation Readiness Index (TRI), a scalable text-based metric that estimates a publication's semantic proximity to patent-linked science using only its title and abstract. Trained on over 20,000 scientific papers, contrasting papers paired with U.S. patents for the same invention against non-patent papers from the same journals, TRI uses domain-specific document embeddings to detect latent linguistic signals. Patent-paired papers consistently use an action-oriented "language of invention", whereas non-patent papers favor observational framing. Using only titles and abstracts, the model accurately distinguishes patent-paired research from comparison papers (ROC-AUC = 0.774). External validation across independent datasets shows that higher TRI scores strongly align with real-world translational activity. High scores correlate with industry coauthorship, author patent histories, and independent commercial-potential benchmarks. At the institutional level across leading global universities, average TRI correlates significantly with university-industry collaboration (r = 0.364, p < 0.001). TRI provides an automated early-stage screening tool to prioritize research for expert review, measuring semantic proximity to patented science rather than guaranteed commercial outcomes.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2026

Shifting Social Dispositions, Stable Prosocial Traits: A Global Age-Period-Cohort Analysis of Human Personality

Generational stereotypes are widespread, but they often rely on anecdotes, and it remains challenging to disentangle true birth-cohort differences from the universal effects of ageing and historical periods. Using a statistical approach that separates effects of age, calendar time, and cohort, we analyzed Big Five personality data (five broad dimensions of personality) from N=773,714 individuals assessed across 30 years. Traits that shape social interaction diverged between generations, whereas a prosocial core comprising morality, discipline, and emotional awareness was stable across cohorts. Generation Z (born between 1995 and 2012) showed lower excitement seeking and gregariousness alongside higher self-consciousness and anxiety. These findings suggest that cohort change is selective rather than global: the dispositions through which people engage with the social world may be adapting to contemporary cultural conditions, while core prosocial tendencies remain stable across generations.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2026

Who Connects Global Aid? The Hidden Geometry of 10 Million Transactions

The global aid system functions as a complex and evolving ecosystem; yet widespread understanding of its structure remains largely limited to aggregate volume flows. Here we map the network topology of global aid using a dataset of unprecedented scale: over 10 million transaction records connecting 2,456 publishing organisations across 230 countries between 1967 and 2025. We apply bipartite projection and dimensionality reduction to reveal the geometry of the system and unveil hidden patterns. This exposes distinct functional clusters that are otherwise sparsely connected. We find that while governments and multilateral agencies provide the primary resources, a small set of knowledge brokers provide the critical connectivity. Universities and research foundations specifically act as essential bridges between disparate islands of implementers and funders. We identify a core solar system of 25 central actors who drive this connectivity including unanticipated brokers like J-PAL and the Hewlett Foundation. These findings demonstrate that influence in the aid ecosystem flows through structural connectivity as much as financial volume. Our results provide a new framework for donors to identify strategic partners that accelerate coordination and evidence diffusion across the global network.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2025

Cosmos 1.0: a multidimensional map of the emerging technology frontier

This paper introduces the Cosmos 1.0 dataset and describes a novel methodology for creating and mapping a universe of technologies, adjacent concepts, and entities. We utilise various source data that contain a rich diversity and breadth of contemporary knowledge. The Cosmos 1.0 dataset comprises 23,544 technology-adjacent entities (TA23k) with a hierarchical structure and eight categories of external indices. Each entity is represented by a 100-dimensional contextual embedding vector, which we use to assign it to seven thematic tech-clusters (TC7) and three meta tech-clusters (TC3). We manually verify 100 emerging technologies (ET100). This dataset is enriched with additional indices specifically developed to assess the landscape of emerging technologies, including the Technology Awareness Index, Generality Index, Deeptech, and Age of Tech Index. The dataset incorporates extensive metadata sourced from Wikipedia and linked data from third-party sources such as Crunchbase, Google Books, OpenAlex and Google Scholar, which are used to validate the relevance and accuracy of the constructed indices.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Signals from the Floods: AI-Driven Disaster Analysis through Multi-Source Data Fusion

Massive and diverse web data are increasingly vital for government disaster response, as demonstrated by the 2022 floods in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. This study examines how X (formerly Twitter) and public inquiry submissions provide insights into public behaviour during crises. We analyse more than 55,000 flood-related tweets and 1,450 submissions to identify behavioural patterns during extreme weather events. While social media posts are short and fragmented, inquiry submissions are detailed, multi-page documents offering structured insights. Our methodology integrates Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modelling with Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance semantic understanding. LDA reveals distinct opinions and geographic patterns, while LLMs improve filtering by identifying flood-relevant tweets using public submissions as a reference. This Relevance Index method reduces noise and prioritizes actionable content, improving situational awareness for emergency responders. By combining these complementary data streams, our approach introduces a novel AI-driven method to refine crisis-related social media content, improve real-time disaster response, and inform long-term resilience planning.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Harmony in the Australian Domain Space

In this paper we use for the first time a systematic approach in the study of harmonic centrality at a Web domain level, and gather a number of significant new findings about the Australian web. In particular, we explore the relationship between economic diversity at the firm level and the structure of the Web within the Australian domain space, using harmonic centrality as the main structural feature. The distribution of harmonic centrality values is analyzed over time, and we find that the distributions exhibit a consistent pattern across the different years. The observed distribution is well captured by a partition of the domain space into six clusters; the temporal movement of domain names across these six positions yields insights into the Australian Domain Space and exhibits correlations with other non-structural characteristics. From a more global perspective, we find a significant correlation between the median harmonic centrality of all domains in each OECD country and one measure of global trust, the WJP Rule of Law Index. Further investigation demonstrates that 35 countries in OECD share similar harmonic centrality distributions. The observed homogeneity in distribution presents a compelling avenue for exploration, potentially unveiling critical corporate, regional, or national insights.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2023

Informing Innovation Management: Linking Leading R&D Firms and Emerging Technologies

Understanding the relationship between emerging technology and research and development has long been of interest to companies, policy makers and researchers. In this paper new sources of data and tools are combined with a novel technique to construct a model linking a defined set of emerging technologies with the global leading R&D spending companies. The result is a new map of this landscape. This map reveals the proximity of technologies and companies in the knowledge embedded in their corresponding Wikipedia profiles, enabling analysis of the closest associations between the companies and emerging technologies. A significant positive correlation for a related set of patent data validates the approach. Finally, a set of Circular Economy Emerging Technologies are matched to their closest leading R&D spending company, prompting future research ideas in broader or narrower application of the model to specific technology themes, company competitor landscapes and national interest concerns.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2023

The Science of Startups: The Impact of Founder Personalities on Company Success

Startup companies solve many of today's most complex and challenging scientific, technical and social problems, such as the decarbonisation of the economy, air pollution, and the development of novel life-saving vaccines. Startups are a vital source of social, scientific and economic innovation, yet the most innovative are also the least likely to survive. The probability of success of startups has been shown to relate to several firm-level factors such as industry, location and the economy of the day. Still, attention has increasingly considered internal factors relating to the firm's founding team, including their previous experiences and failures, their centrality in a global network of other founders and investors as well as the team's size. The effects of founders' personalities on the success of new ventures are mainly unknown. Here we show that founder personality traits are a significant feature of a firm's ultimate success. We draw upon detailed data about the success of a large-scale global sample of startups. We found that the Big 5 personality traits of startup founders across 30 dimensions significantly differed from that of the population at large. Key personality facets that distinguish successful entrepreneurs include a preference for variety, novelty and starting new things (openness to adventure), like being the centre of attention (lower levels of modesty) and being exuberant (higher activity levels). However, we do not find one "Founder-type" personality; instead, six different personality types appear, with startups founded by a "Hipster, Hacker and Hustler" being twice as likely to succeed. Our results also demonstrate the benefits of larger, personality-diverse teams in startups, which has the potential to be extended through further research into other team settings within business, government and research.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2021

Evolution of diversity and dominance of companies in online activity

Ever since the web began, the number of websites has been growing exponentially. These websites cover an ever-increasing range of online services that fill a variety of social and economic functions across a growing range of industries. Yet the networked nature of the web, combined with the economics of preferential attachment, increasing returns and global trade, suggest that over the long run a small number of competitive giants are likely to dominate each functional market segment, such as search, retail and social media. Here we perform a large scale longitudinal study to quantify the distribution of attention given in the online environment to competing organisations. In two large online social media datasets, containing more than 10 billion posts and spanning more than a decade, we tally the volume of external links posted towards the organisations' main domain name as a proxy for the online attention they receive. We also use the Common Crawl dataset -- which contains the linkage patterns between more than a billion different websites -- to study the patterns of link concentration over the past three years across the entire web. Lastly, we showcase the linking between economic, financial and market data by exploring the relationships between online attention on social media and the growth in enterprise value in the electric carmaker Tesla. Our analysis shows that despite the fact that we observe consistent growth in all the macro indicators -- the total amount of online attention, in the number of organisations with an online presence, and in the functions they perform -- we also observe that a smaller number of organisations account for an ever-increasing proportion of total user attention, usually with one large player dominating each function. These results highlight how evolution of the online economy involves innovation, diversity, and then competitive dominance.

cs.CY↗