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...

Multi-Dimensional Output-Oriented Power System Resilience based on Degraded Functionality

Power systems serve social communities that consist of residential, commercial, and industrial customers. As a result, the disaster resilience of a power system should account for social community resilience. The social behavior and psychological features of all stakeholders involved in a disaster influence the level of power system preparedness...

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...

Beyond instrumentalism: Broadening the understanding of social innovation in socio-technical energy systems

Social innovation is an important dimension of current transformations in energy systems. It can refer to alternative business models, novel policy instruments, financing schemes, participatory governance approaches to energy questions, or new discourses. Its significance for energy systems is often considered in narrow instrumentalist terms,...

The Routledge Handbook of Housing Policy and Planning: Uncovering the Janus Head of Forced Residential Relocation

The Netherlands is internationally known for its relatively large social rented housing stock. Since the policy genesis of urban renewal (Stedelijke Vernieuwing) in 1997, urban restructuring has gained traction, especially in the early postwar neighborhoods. With demolition and new housing construction as key instruments of restructuring, the...

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...

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...

New Frontiers in Analyzing Dynamic Group Interactions: Bridging Social and Computer Science

This special issue on advancing interdisciplinary collaboration between computer scientists and social scientists documents the joint results of the international Lorentz workshop, “Interdisciplinary Insights into Group and Team Dynamics,” which took place in Leiden, The Netherlands, July 2016. An equal number of scholars from social and...

Safety in large-scale socio-technological systems: Insights gained from a series of systems studies

There is still much debate in the safety literature about how to deal with the complexi- ties and dynamics of large-scale socio-technological systems especially. How, for in- stance, comes safety about in ‘high-tech’ complex systems? Also, how should assess- ments of technological (or artefactual) safety be performed in these kinds of systems?...

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...

Experiments on Socio-Technical Systems: The Problem of Control

My aim is to question whether the introduction of new technologies in society may be considered to be genuine experiments. I will argue that they are not, at least not in the sense in which the notion of experiment is being used in the natural and social sciences. If the introduction of a new technology in society is interpreted as an experiment...

A surge of p-values between 0.041 and 0.049 in recent decades (but negative results are increasing rapidly too)

It is known that statistically significant (positive) results are more likely to be published than non-significant (negative) results. However, it has been unclear whether any increasing prevalence of positive results is stronger in the "softer" disciplines (social sciences) than in the "harder" disciplines (physical sciences), and whether the...

Towards Playful Organizations: How online gamers organize themselves (and what other organizations can learn from them)

Gaming has played an important part in our daily lives for quite some time now. As a result, many researchers are interested in the various ways in which gaming has an impact beyond its own context. This dissertation explores one particular type of impact, i.e., the impact of gaming on organizations. It theorizes that gaming is a frame of mind...

On measuring and explaining neighbourhood success: A behavioural economic approach

This study combines qualitative and quantitative research methods to explain which factors contribute to a problem-free or problematic functioning of neighbourhoods in general and especially of Dutch neighbourhoods that were built in the first years after World War II. An important part of the book is about the development of measuring...

Policy discourse, people’s internal frames, and declared aircraft noise annoyance: An application of Q-methodology

Aircraft noise annoyance is studied extensively, but often without an explicit theoretical framework. In this article, a social approach for noise annoyance is proposed. The idea that aircraft noise is meaningful to people within a socially produced discourse is assumed and tested. More particularly, it is expected that the noise policy...