Cybernetics

• observations of human/machine interactions during World War 2
  • computer-assisted anti-aircraft guns
  • inspired by / enabled systems analysis
• from Greek kybernetike for "governance"
• feedback loops: outputs connected to inputs
• the foundational meetings were the Macy Conferences

10th Macy Conference group photo

• started in 1946, in New York City
• early Computer Scientists (there were about 3 digital computers in existence)
  • John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Warren McCullouch, JCR Licklider, and many others
• psychologists from the Gestalt school
  • Kurt Lewin, Wolfgang Köhler
  • "the whole is different from the sum of its parts"
  • attracted to systems/feedback loops

John von Neumann

• the original hacker?
  • simulated nuclear explosions in WW2
  • wrote code for ENIAC, UNIVAC, whatever
  • no programming language had been invented yet
• pioneer of big data
• von Neumann computer architecture
• very active in academic society
  • at the right place at the right time
  • repeatedly
• Influenced: Mandelbrot, Feynman, Wolfram

Kurt Lewin

• sometimes called the father of Social Psychology
• Field Theory: \(B = f(P, S)\)
  • behaviour is a function of the person and their situation
  • people respond differently to different situations
    • our perceptions are part of the situation
• Lewin presented Field Theory at the 2nd Macy Conference.
• Influenced: Köhler, Bandura, Mischel, Shioda

Reaching hands

• Cybernetic movement rapidly collapsed
  • Artificial Intelligence partly took up the cause
  • Computer Science sortof dominated
  • Psychology, despite studying mind and brain, remained at a distance
• Social Psychology and Personality Psychology split over Lewin's Theory
  • possibly for lack of a computational, analytic framework?
• the students of von Neumann never connected with the students of Lewin

vCard

• PhD Candidate, Social Psychology
• Psychology Department
• Studying: Social Complexity and Collective Intelligence
  • agent-based modelling
  • experimental psychology
  • social network analysis
  • memes
• Academic background
  • BS Cognitive Science, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Research Analyst, Berkeley
  • MA Psychology, University of Toronto
• http://imiller.utsc.utoronto.ca

Itinerary by Matthew Paris ca. 1250-1259

• social psychology meets artificial intelligence
• pub2: self publishing
• memelab: meme sharing
• topoli: twitter political memes
• rofo: Rob Ford social network
• urban legends: memes and network topologies
• gh-impact: influence in open source software
• election-memes: 2016 US election memes
• pplapi: human simulacrum as a service

10th Macy Conference group photo

• Lewin and von Neumann meet at Macy 1 and 2:
  • March 1946
  • October 1946
• consider that moment in time as a starting point
• imagine spidering their social networks
• social network with one particular constraint:
  • authors must be linked via co-authorship

some example BibTeX

• database of citations
• BibTeX is the interchange format
  • read/write citations
  • compatible with everything
    • R
    • Python
    • LaTeX
  • ugly, but good enough
• my Zotero library consists of \(n \approx\) 2500 citations
  • autoexport plugin syncs a .bib file

• identify the largest component
  • \(n_{authors} = 1574\)
  • \(n_{edges} = 4905\)
• look at 2nd-largest component for authors who are missing a link
  • library is curated, not randomly sampled
• calculate modularity (stochastic) to identify communities
  • \(n_{communities} = 34\)

The missing link?

• situated myself in the citation graph
• citation data "in the wild" are very poor quality
• the communities (detected by modularity) seem plausible
• some communities resisted collaboration
  • Royal Society
  • US and UK WWII computer scientists
  • CS and Psychology sides of AI
• von Neumann is very distantly connected to Lewin's students
  • Lewin's death may have dashed any chances of a collaboration

pub2 example source

• like Jekyll (static site generator) for PDFs
  • generates PDF and .bib file that links to PDF
  • simple LaTeX isn't so different from Markdown
  • YAML preamble/templating like Jekyll
  • actually sits on top of an existing Jekyll install
• more info
  • pip install pub2
  • http://pub2.readthedocs.io

Microscope

• participants
  • UTSC undergrads
  • n=118 participants
  • each participant created 2 memes (total = 236)
  • 50% had created memes before study
• Demo
  • pick a background picture
  • put words at the top and bottom of the picture
  • use sharing interface so friends can see meme

This is a linear model displayed graphically

• model incorporates features of the content
  • boolean values
  • subject: the meme is academic or not (in this study: animal)
  • language: the meme caption includes self-reference words or not
• model also incorporates ratings
  • meme is funny
  • personally meaningful

Simulation zoomed detail

• At each time “tick”
• the experiment wanders the space
• and recruits any agents who happen to be in the vicinity.
• Recruited agents create a meme (based on gaussian noise)
• and those agents share with a probability determined by the regression function.
• Infections signified by agent remarking, “Seen it.” An edge arrow tracks infection.

panning for gold

• frequency minus “stopwords”
  • looking forward to
  • mayor of toronto
  • toronto mayoral race
  • city of toronto
  • this is the
• pointwise mutual information (PMI)
  • the gravy train
  • the island airport
  • little red apples
  • a speedy recovery
  • the shirtless jogger

Replicate lab topology

• serial transmission paradigm
  • participants are linked into chains
• topology
  • 160 agents
  • 40 transmission chains
  • 4 agents per chain
  • 3 time steps
• disgusting legends are shared so infrequently that in practice, the 4th participants rarely receives anything.
• follow-up study: does it help to have 100x more agents? no.

Replicate lab topology

• connected agents via preferential attachment
• after 3 time steps, expected "viral" outcomes were obtained
  • agents in the 3rd step were finally receiving a good portion of memes
• explored other network sizes \(n=800\) and \(n=16000\)
  • with more agents and more possible connections, even disgusting legends stay alive

Geometric roof

• lab studies can provide valuable models of behaviour
  • even if the lab study is implausible
  • even if it does not perform "correctly" out of context
• models can be transplanted from the literature into agent-based simulations
• a model can be "ported" from an unfavourable context to a more plausible environment

Vote

• we are approaching US election day
• 4 platforms:
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • imgur
  • facebook
• about 38,000 memes
• collected by a meme aggregator called Sizzle
• interesting data: total number of likes

Results are available as JSON

• enables agent based modelling in varying social and geopolitical contexts
• Supports:
  • netlogo
  • MASON
  • R
  • LISP (so: ACT-R, others)
• an analogy for netlogo users
  • Agent : AgentSpace ::
  • Behavior : BehaviorSpace

Geometric roof

• Simulacrum as a Service
  • certain caveats apply
• plugs in with many existing modelling frameworks
  • examples in several languages: netlogo, mason, R
• you can actually experiment with pplapi.com
  • rate limited, but otherwise open
• actively using pplapi on several social projects
• http://pplapi.com

Itinerary by Matthew Paris ca. 1250-1259

• social psychology meets artificial intelligence
• pub2: self publishing
• memelab: meme sharing
• topoli: twitter political memes
• rofo: Rob Ford social network
• urban legends: memes and network topologies
• gh-impact: influence in open source software
• election-memes: 2016 US election memes
• pplapi: human simulacrum as a service

the end

• a wide range of social phenomena can be explored with agent-based modelling
• networks are a powerful too for organizing and utilizing relationships
• memes are an excellent unit of analysis. simultaneously:
  • a coherent concept that is meaningful to humans
  • a chunk of data that can be quantified and tracked
• Field Theory was the conceptual bridge between these disciplines
• My current work is called Iterated Field Theory

vCard

• thank you for the opportunity to present
• this presentation is online
  • http://iandennismiller.github.io/net-complex-intel
• contact information
  • http://imiller.utsc.utoronto.ca