This page contains a list of terms that I seem to be reusing a lot. Hyperlinks are to references

• Belief/Opinion Space – A subset of information space that is associated with opinions. For example, there is little debate about what a table is, but the shape of the table has often been a source of serious diplomatic contention
  • Opinion dynamics and bounded confidence models, analysis, and simulation
  • Cultural algorithms: modeling of how cultures learn to solve problems
• Medium – the technology that mediates the communication that coordinates the group. With respect to this research, the following factors vary distinctly as the technology shifts from physical into electronic and digital contexts:
  • Social Influence Horizon (SIH)– How many individuals is an agent interacting with at a moment in time. Evolutionarily we may be best suited to 7 +/- 2
    • Influence of the number of topologically interacting neighbors on swarm dynamics
    • Starling Flock Networks Manage Uncertainty in Consensus at Low Cost
    • Interaction ruling animal collective behavior depends on topological rather than metric distance: Evidence from a field study
    • The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information
  • Network Structure – among other properties, connections can be one way (broadcast) or two way (face to face). This profoundly affects the speed of coordination in groups
    • A survey of gossiping and broadcasting in communication networks
    • The effect of network topology on the spread of epidemics
    • Sociophysics: an introduction (Chapter 1: Topology of the underlying network structure)
  • Translucence – How ‘visible’ is the individual on the other side of the communication? Socially translucent systems  have three characteristics—visibility, awareness, and accountability—which enable people to draw upon their experience and expertise to structure their interactions with one another.
    • Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes
  • Friction – How difficult is it to use the medium? For example in physical space, it is trivial to interact with someone nearby, but becomes progressively difficult with distance. Broadcasting makes it trivial for a small number of people to reach large numbers, but not the reverse. Computer mediated designs typically try to reduce the friction of interaction.
    • Creating friction: infrastructuring civic engagement in everyday life
    • The sciences of the artificial
  • (Digital) Inadvertent Social Information – Traces of activity left by users of information systems. In this work, I am most interested in the process of alignment in text, linking and other activities performed as members of a group.
    • Public information: from nosy neighbors to cultural evolution
    • From I to We: Group Formation and Linguistic Adaption in an Online Xenophobic Forum
    • Consensus and Cooperation in Networked Multi-Agent Systems
    • An appropriate Tweet
• Coordination of intelligent individuals in belief space requires:
  • Dimension Reduction – The process by which groups decide where to coordinate. The lower the dimensions, the easier (less calculation) it takes to act together. Dimension reduction is a feature, not a bug. It allows thinking to be reduced to practice. It comes with the risk that practice can successfully replace thinking for some period of time without ill effects.
    • Beyond Individual Choice, pages 89, 95, and 130
    • Conflict and Consensus A General Theory of Collective Decision, pages 97, 174, and 180
  • State – a multidimensional measure of current belief and interest. A position in the multidimensional space. Related to path dependency, and Kaufmann’s “adjacent possible”
    • Resilience: The emergence of a perspective for social–ecological systems analyses
    • Ontic openness: An absolute necessity for all developmental processes
    • At home in the universe
  • Orientation – A vector constructed of two measures of state. Used to determine alignment with others
    • Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication
    • Alignment in social interactions
  • Velocity – The amount of change in state over time
    • The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harvest Book, Hb244) (p. 398)
• Behavior patterns of intelligent individuals in belief space. The axis are: 1) Physical cost, or the risk to the individual based on physical factors. Nomads are responsible for all aspects of their well being, while members of a group are responsible for mech less. 2) Cognitive Cost, or the amount of intelligence required to maintain well being. The more social, the less individual intelligence is needed as the cost of processing is distributed over the group. In the most extreme case (e.g. cheating), the amount of intelligence is reduced to one leader individual, who the others follow. This results in a condition where a group faces the risks of nomadic behavior but with the social inertia of a group. 
  • Nomadic Phase – A low SIH means low influence by other agents, so each agent moves along its own largely independent path.
    • Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Don’t Know.
    • Schooling as a strategy for taxis in a noisy environment
  • Flocking Phase – An intermediate SIH results in an agent whose movement is affected by nearby individuals. There is alignment with neighbors, but they do not converge.
    • Consensus and Cooperation in Networked Multi-Agent Systems
    • Schooling as a strategy for taxis in a noisy environment
    • Context-dependent interaction leads to emergent search behavior in social aggregates
  • Stampede Phase – At high SIH, all members are exposed equally to each other. Alignment converges and supports runaway conditions. This is represented in other literature as “filter bubbles”, “echo chambers”, “group polarization”, and “extremism”. Essentially, a stampede has the risks of an individual Nomad with the inertia of a group.
    • Conflict and Consensus A General Theory of Collective Decision (notes here)
    • Filter bubbles, echo chambers, and online news consumption (notes here)
    • Models of speciation by sexual selection on polygenic traits.
• Behavior patterns of designed systems in belief space.
  • 
  • Standalone Systems
  • Complex Systems
  • Monolithic Systems
•  Diversity Injection – Used to support or disrupt the behaviors described above. This consists of the addition of random, factual information to the Information Retrieval Interfaces (IRIs) using mechanisms currently used to deliver advertising. This differs from Serendipity Injection, which attempts to find stochastically relevant information for an individual’s implicit information needs.
  • Level 1: population targeted –  Based on Public Service Announcements (PSAs), information presentation should range from simple, potentially gamified presentations to deep exploration with citations. The same random information is presented by the IRIs to the using population at the same time similarly to the Google Doodle.
    • Shouting to be heard: Public service advertising in a new media age
  • Level 2: group targeted – based on detecting a group’s behaviors. For example, a stampeding group may require information that is more focused on pointing at where flocking activity is occurring and muting content that points in the direction of the stampede.
    • You can’t stay here: The efficacy of reddit’s 2015 ban examined through hate speech
  • Level 3: individual targeted –  Depending on where in the belief space the individual is, there may be different reactions. In a sparsely traveled space, information that lies in the general direction of travel might be a form of useful serendipity. Conversely, when on a path that often leads to violent radicalization, information associated with disrupting the progression of other individuals with similar vectors could be applied. In these cases, results, including paid results that align with extremism should be muted.
    • Discovery is never by chance: designing for (un) serendipity
    • The bohemian bookshelf: supporting serendipitous book discoveries through information visualization
• Map – a type of diagram that supports the plotting of trajectories. In this work, maps of belief space are constructed based on the dimension reduction used by humans in discussion. These maps are assumed to be dynamic over time and may consists of many interrelated, though not necessarily congruent, layers.
  • What is a diagram?
• Herding – Deliberate creation of stampede conditions in groups. Can be an internal process to consolidate a group, or an external, adversarial process.
  • Influence of augmented humans in online interactions during voting events