Author: searri

SIAM News

Tragic acts of terrorism—such as February’s mass stabbing in Austria by a 23-year-old Syrian asylum seeker who was allegedly radicalized online by the Islamic State —accentuate the dangers of radicalization via the internet. Terrorist organizations exploit popular social media platforms to advance their ideology-driven agendas through recruitment, fundraising, and the spread of propaganda — all of which ultimately causes severe harm in communities around the world. From a national security perspective, this drive towards radicalization raises pressing questions about our ability to monitor, quantify, understand, predict, and even mitigate such efforts before they materialize as tragedies.

Pedro Manrique and Neil Johnson

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Europhysics Letters

Why humans fight has no easy answer. However, understanding better how humans fight could inform future humanitarian aid planning and insight into hidden shifts for peace efforts. Here we show that an empirically-grounded physics theory of fighter dynamics — which is a generalization of the well-known physics of polymer assembly — can explain casualty patterns observed across decades of violence in a current conflict hotspot. It also suggests the possibility of future ‘super-shock’ surprise attacks that are even more lethal than have already been seen. These insights from physics open the door to new policy discussions surrounding humanitarian aid and peace efforts that account mechanistically for human violence across scales.

Frank Yingjie Huo, Dylan Restrepo, Pedro Manrique, Gordon Woo, Neil Johnson

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NPJ Complexity

In early 2021, groups of Reddit and Twitter users collaborated to raise the price of GameStop stock from $20 to $400 in a matter of days. The heavy influence of social media activity on the rise of GameStop prices can be contrasted with the muted social media influence on other, more traditional stocks. While traditional stocks are modeled quite successfully by current methods, such methods break down when used to model these so-called meme stocks. Our project analyzes the graph topology of retweet graphs built from GameStop-related tweets and other meme stocks to find that the clustering coefficient and network diameter of a retweet graph can be used to decrease the mean absolute error of meme stock trading volume predictions by as much as 46% over the control group during the first 70 trading days of 2021.

Daniel Verdear, Neil Johnson, Stefan Wuchty

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