Month: April 2023

Cell Decision Making through the Lens of Bayesian Learning

Arnab Barua and Haralampos Hatzikirou

Entropy 2023, 25(4), 609

Cell decision making refers to the process by which cells gather information from their local microenvironment and regulate their internal states to create appropriate responses. Microenvironmental cell sensing plays a key role in this process. Our hypothesis is that cell decision-making regulation is dictated by Bayesian learning. In this article, we explore the implications of this hypothesis for internal state temporal evolution. By using a timescale separation between internal and external variables on the mesoscopic scale, we derive a hierarchical Fokker–Planck equation for cell-microenvironment dynamics. By combining this with the Bayesian learning hypothesis, we find that changes in microenvironmental entropy dominate the cell state probability distribution. Finally, we use these ideas to understand how cell sensing impacts cell decision making. Notably, our formalism allows us to understand cell state dynamics even without exact biochemical information about cell sensing processes by considering a few key parameters.

Read the full article at: www.mdpi.com

Generalized network density matrices for analysis of multiscale functional diversity

Arsham Ghavasieh and Manlio De Domenico
Phys. Rev. E 107, 044304

The network density matrix formalism allows for describing the dynamics of information on top of complex structures and it has been successfully used to analyze, e.g., a system’s robustness, perturbations, coarse-graining multilayer networks, characterization of emergent network states, and performing multiscale analysis. However, this framework is usually limited to diffusion dynamics on undirected networks. Here, to overcome some limitations, we propose an approach to derive density matrices based on dynamical systems and information theory, which allows for encapsulating a much wider range of linear and nonlinear dynamics and richer classes of structure, such as directed and signed ones. We use our framework to study the response to local stochastic perturbations of synthetic and empirical networks, including neural systems consisting of excitatory and inhibitory links and gene-regulatory interactions. Our findings demonstrate that topological complexity does not necessarily lead to functional diversity, i.e., the complex and heterogeneous response to stimuli or perturbations. Instead, functional diversity is a genuine emergent property which cannot be deduced from the knowledge of topological features such as heterogeneity, modularity, the presence of asymmetries, and dynamical properties of a system.

Read the full article at: link.aps.org

Quantifying the Benefit of Artificial Intelligence for Scientific Research

Jian Gao, Dashun Wang

The ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has the potential to change almost every line of work. As AI capabilities continue to improve in accuracy, robustness, and reach, AI may outperform and even replace human experts across many valuable tasks. Despite enormous efforts devoted to understanding AI’s impact on labor and the economy and its recent success in accelerating scientific discovery and progress, we lack a systematic understanding of how advances in AI may benefit scientific research across disciplines and fields. Here we develop a measurement framework to estimate both the direct use of AI and the potential benefit of AI in scientific research by applying natural language processing techniques to 87.6 million publications and 7.1 million patents. We find that the use of AI in research appears widespread throughout the sciences, growing especially rapidly since 2015, and papers that use AI exhibit an impact premium, more likely to be highly cited both within and outside their disciplines. While almost every discipline contains some subfields that benefit substantially from AI, analyzing 4.6 million course syllabi across various educational disciplines, we find a systematic misalignment between the education of AI and its impact on research, suggesting the supply of AI talents in scientific disciplines is not commensurate with AI research demands. Lastly, examining who benefits from AI within the scientific workforce, we find that disciplines with a higher proportion of women or black scientists tend to be associated with less benefit, suggesting that AI’s growing impact on research may further exacerbate existing inequalities in science. As the connection between AI and scientific research deepens, our findings may have an increasing value, with important implications for the equity and sustainability of the research enterprise.

Read the full article at: arxiv.org

International Economic Integration from the Perspective of Economic Complexity and Economic Fitness: A Methodological Proposal

González, A.; González, S.; Pereira, G.; Blanco, G. and von Lücken, C. (2023). In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Complexity, Future Information Systems and Risk – COMPLEXIS, ISBN 978-989-758-644-6; ISSN 2184-5034, SciTePress, pages 109-121. DOI: 10.5220/0012059400003485

International Economic Integration can be described as a process in which a group of countries seeks mutual benefits through mechanisms such as the elimination and/or reduction of trade, social, and political barriers between others. From an economic point of view, the importance of the integration of countries is fundamental for their development simply because most of them are part of some system of international economic integration. In this work, the issue of economic integration will not be discussed in depth but instead will oversee proposing some well-known metrics in the field of economic development that could be very useful as analysis and decision-making tools. in the process of regional economic integration. In this sense, this work proposes using concepts and metrics of Economic Complexity and Economic Fitness to identify combined productive capacities between countries that are part of an economic block, whether real or fictitious. The problem in understanding how econo mically integrate the countries is to identify the combined productive capacities that would exist if two or more countries that make up an economic block are considered as a single country. Experimental analyzes were carried out for a fictitious case, where a world with 10 countries and 15 products is presented; in addition, 3 economic blocks were defined, which were analyzed applying economic complexity and economic fitness metrics. The results obtained reflect the great importance of economic integration since, by establishing economic blocks, it is possible to capture more productive capacities by improving both the diversity of the economic block and the ubiquity of the products produced in it by addressing the productive capacities of the member countries.

Read the full article at: www.scitepress.org

BrainNet 2023

25-26 May 2023, Stockholm, Sweden

BrainNet workshop brings together researchers working within or at the intersection of complex networks, data analysis, neuroscience, and mathematics. The aim is to be an interdisciplinary forum for fostering cross-pollination of ideas between these fields.

Read the full article at: brainnet23.github.io