Editorial: Tipping points in societies

Cities in interaction: Analysing the Dutch system of cities with computational methods

Cities never function in isolation but as nodes in overarching systems characterised by flows of goods, people, and information. To fully understand the evolution of cities, a relational approach is needed, which investigates cities in relation to other cities and urban regions. While a significant part of urban system research has focused on...

Environomic-Based Social Demand Response in Cyber-Physical-Social Power Systems

According to the Department of Energy, demand response provides an opportunity for end-users to play a significant role in the efficiency, reliability, resilience, and sustainability of a power grid. This is made possible owing to the existence of storage devices and diversity of energy sources at the customer level and the advent of the...

Stewardship of global collective behavior

Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social...

Predicting the infuence of Urban vacant lots on neighborhood property values

Vacant lots are municipally-owned land parcels which were acquired post-abandonment or due to tax foreclosures. With time, failure to sell or find alternate uses for vacant lots results in them causing adverse effects on the health and safety of residents, and cost the city both directly and indirectly. Although existing research has tried to...

Using Social Media for Attendees Density Estimation in City-Scale Events

City-scale events attract large amounts of attendees in temporarily re-purposed urban environments. In this setting, the real-time measurement of the density of attendees stationing in – or moving through – the event terrain is central to applications such as crowd management, emergency support, and quality of service...

Group interaction frontiers in technology

Over the last decade, the study of group behavior for multimodal interaction technologies has increased. However, we believe that despite its potential benefits on society, there could be more activity in this area. The aim of this workshop is create a forum for more interdisciplinary dialogue on this topic to enable the acceleration of...

Bursting the Filter Bubble: Democracy, Design, and Ethics

Online web services such as Google and Facebook started using personalization algorithms. Because information is customized per user by the algorithms of these services, two users who use the same search query or have the same friend list may get different results. Online services argue that by using personalization algorithms, they may show the...