6. Sociophysics and Econophysics
Workshop organized by: M.L. Bertotti and V. Constantoudis
Income and wealth inequality and related issues
M.L. Bertotti
As has also been recently acknowledged in several speeches of important political and economical representatives, rising levels of economic inequality represent a major moral and political issue of our time. Yet, statistical physics can provide methods and tools which are both innovative and helpful towards a deeper comprehension of the mechanisms underlying the emergence of this and similar collective phenomena. Thanks to its very nature and to the exploratory character of his models, statistical physics can, in a continuous dialogue with economics, political economics and related disciplines, contribute to the identification of actions towards inequality reduction and to the study and treatment of related questions as well.
Statistical Physics of Social Networks
Recent events in volatile geo-political regions underscore the need to develop models and theories predicting emergent properties of social systems associated with socio-political instabilities and tipping points. Statistical physics applied to social networks have seen a burst of new activity in the last few years addressing some of these issues. In particular, the properties of nonequilibrium opinion dynamics on a range of ideal and real networks such as the time scales to consensus as a function of underlying topology and local interactions have been extensively reported. Human behavior, the spreading of population-level trends, and the evolution of cultural norms are profoundly affected by the influenceability of individuals and the social networks that link them together. The roles and optimal placement of committed agents with fixed opinions which model individuals and institutions such as mavens and extreme fundamentalists have been of central focus in view of their relevance to recent social upheavals. This session will discuss latest results on the above signficant topics from a statistical and dynamical approach.
Statistical physics of language
V. Constantoudis
Motivation: In the last years, it has been realized that the concepts and methods of statistical physics can be applied successfully to systems besides the traditional areas of their applications. One outstanding example is the natural language including both the analysis of written texts and speech signals. Due to the enormous impact of language technologies in the communication and networking facilities of modern societies along with the concomitant collection of big data and the rapidly emerging issue of their taxonomy and structuring, the prospects and future of the statistical methods in these fields should be further elaborated and critically discussed.
Aim: The intention of this workshop is to gather physicists working on the analysis of language to give them the opportunity to exchange ideas and methods and discuss their results and the future of this approach. Furthermore, the challenge is to attract also quantitative and computational linguists to expose their methods and interact with/criticize physicists’ approaches and results. We believe that such an interaction would have a mutual benefit and enrich the conceptual and methodological tools of both communities.