No Arabic abstract
Environments for decentralized on-line collaboration are now widespread on the Web, underpinning open-source efforts, knowledge creation sites including Wikipedia, and other experiments in joint production. When a distributed group works together in such a setting, the mechanisms they use for coordination can play an important role in the effectiveness of the groups performance. Here we consider the trade-offs inherent in coordination in these on-line settings, balancing the benefits to collaboration with the cost in effort that could be spent in other ways. We consider two diverse domains that each contain a wide range of collaborations taking place simultaneously -- Wikipedia and GitHub -- allowing us to study how coordination varies across different projects. We analyze trade-offs in coordination along two main dimensions, finding similar effects in both our domains of study: first we show that, in aggregate, high-status projects on these sites manage the coordination trade-off at a different level than typical projects; and second, we show that projects use a different balance of coordination when they are crowded, with relatively small size but many participants. We also develop a stylized theoretical model for the cost-benefit trade-off inherent in coordination and show that it qualitatively matches the trade-offs we observe between crowdedness and coordination.
We perform laboratory experiments to elucidate the role of historical information in games involving human coordination. Our approach follows prior work studying human network coordination using the task of graph coloring. We first motivate this research by showing empirical evidence that the resolution of coloring conflicts is dependent upon the recent local history of that conflict. We also conduct two tailored experiments to manipulate the game history that can be used by humans in order to determine (i) whether humans use historical information, and (ii) whether they use it effectively. In the first variant, during the course of each coloring task, the network positions of the subjects were periodically swapped while maintaining the global coloring state of the network. In the second variant, participants completed a series of 2-coloring tasks, some of which were restarts from checkpoints of previous tasks. Thus, the participants restarted the coloring task from a point in the middle of a previous task without knowledge of the history that led to that point. We report on the game dynamics and average completion times for the diverse graph topologies used in the swap and restart experiments.
People differ in how they attend to, interpret, and respond to their surroundings. Convergent processing of the world may be one factor that contributes to social connections between individuals. We used neuroimaging and network analysis to investigate whether the most central individuals in their communities (as measured by in-degree centrality, a notion of popularity) process the world in a particularly normative way. More central individuals had exceptionally similar neural responses to their peers and especially to each other in brain regions associated with high-level interpretations and social cognition (e.g., in the default-mode network), whereas less-central individuals exhibited more idiosyncratic responses. Self-reported enjoyment of and interest in stimuli followed a similar pattern, but accounting for these data did not change our main results. These findings suggest an Anna Karenina principle in social networks: Highly-central individuals process the world in exceptionally similar ways, whereas less-central individuals process the world in idiosyncratic ways.
In this early draft, we describe a decentralized, app-based approach to COVID-19 vaccine distribution that facilitates zero knowledge verification, dynamic vaccine scheduling, continuous symptoms reporting, access to aggregate analytics based on population trends and more. To ensure equity, our solution is developed to work with limited internet access as well. In addition, we describe the six critical functions that we believe last mile vaccination management platforms must perform, examine existing vaccine management systems, and present a model for privacy-focused, individual-centric solutions.
This paper proposes decentralized resource-aware coordination schemes for solving network optimization problems defined by objective functions which combine locally evaluable costs with network-wide coupling components. These methods are well suited for a group of supervised agents trying to solve an optimization problem under mild coordination requirements. Each agent has information on its local cost and coordinates with the network supervisor for information about the coupling term of the cost. The proposed approach is feedback-based and asynchronous by design, guarantees anytime feasibility, and ensures the asymptotic convergence of the network state to the desired optimizer. Numerical simulations on a power system example illustrate our results.
In this paper, we investigate the problem of coordination between economic dispatch (ED) and demand response (DR) in multi-energy systems (MESs), aiming to improve the economic utility and reduce the waste of energy in MESs. Since multiple energy sources are coupled through energy hubs (EHs), the supply-demand constraints are nonconvex. To deal with this issue, we propose a linearization method to transform the coordination problem to a convex social welfare optimization one. Then a decentralized algorithm based on parallel Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) and dynamic average tracking protocol is developed, where each agent could only make decisions based on information from their neighbors. Moreover, by using variational inequality and Lyapunov-based techniques, we show that our algorithm could always converge to the global optimal solution. Finally, a case study on the modified IEEE 14-bus network verifies the feasibility and effectiveness of our algorithm.