Panic, Irrationality, and Herding: Three Ambiguous Terms in Crowd Dynamics Research

Background. The three terms "panic", "irrationality", and "herding" are ubiquitous in the crowd dynamics literature and have a strong influence on both modelling and management practices. The terms are also commonly shared between the scientific and nonscientific domains. The pervasiveness of the use of these terms is to the point where their underlying assumptions have often been treated as common knowledge by both experts and lay persons. Yet, at the same time, the literature on crowd dynamics presents ample debate, contradiction, and inconsistency on these topics. Method.

Design, Implementation and Test of a Flexible Tor-oriented Web Mining Toolkit

Searching and retrieving information from the Web is a primary activity needed to monitor the development and usage of Web resources. Possible benefits include improving user experience (e.g. by optimizing query results) and enforcing data/user security (e.g. by identifying harmful websites). Motivated by the lack of ready-to-use solutions, in this paper we present a flexible and accessible toolkit for structure and content mining, able to crawl, download, extract and index resources from the Web.

An interface-free multi-scale multi-order model for traffic flow

In this paper we present a new multi-scale method for reproducing traffic flow which couples a first-order macroscopic model with a second-order microscopic model, avoiding any interface or boundary conditions between them. The multi-scale model is characterized by the fact that microscopic and macroscopic descriptions are not spatially separated. On the contrary, the macro-scale is always active while the micro-scale is activated only if needed by the traffic conditions.

Modeling the Effect of High Calorie Diet on the Interplay between Adipose Tissue, Inflammation, and Diabetes

Background. Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a chronic metabolic disease potentially leading to serious widespread tissue damage. Human organism develops T2D when the glucose-insulin control is broken for reasons that are not fully understood but have been demonstrated to be linked to the emergence of a chronic inflammation. Indeed such low-level chronic inflammation affects the pancreatic production of insulin and triggers the development of insulin resistance, eventually leading to an impaired control of the blood glucose concentration.

Network-Aware Evaluation Environment for Reputation Systems

Parties of reputation systems rate each other and use ratings to compute reputation scores that drive their interactions. When deciding which reputation model to deploy in a network environment, it is important to find the most suitable model and to determine its right initial configuration. This calls for an engineering approach for describing, implementing and evaluating reputation systems while taking into account specific aspects of both the reputation systems and the networked environment where they will run.