SCL seminar of the Center for the Study of Complex Systems, will be held on Friday, 16 December 2016 at 14:00 in the library reading room “Dr. Dragan Popović" of the Institute of Physics Belgrade. The talk entitled

"The dynamics of collective knowledge building via questions and answers"

will be given by Dr. Marija Mitrović Dankulov (Scientific Computing Laboratory, Center for the Study of Complex Systems, Institute of Physics Belgrade).

Abstract of the talk:

Collective knowledge building is an example of cooperative human dynamics, which requires meaningful and logically coordinated interactions, and as such it represents a challenging problem to physics and social dynamics modeling. Question and Answers (Q&A) sites are an excellent example of a human dynamics system where knowledge advances trough a collaborative problem solving. In this talk we will demonstrate how dynamics of collective knowledge building can be studied in a quantitative manner using methods and tools from statistical physics and complex network theory [1]. Specifically, we will combine empirical analysis and a two-scale dynamics model and show that this process occurs as a collective phenomenon in a large network of actors and artifacts. This emergent behavior will be quantified trough the analysis of the characteristic self-organizational patterns, topological properties of evolving networks and measuring of advancement of knowledge in time. Our results show that the level of individual expertise plays a substantial role in this self-organized dynamics by influencing both the structure of interacting networks and the temporal patterns of knowledge advancement.

[1] M. Mitrović Dankulov, R. Melnik, and B. Tadić, Sci. Rep. 5, 2197 (2015).