Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Modelling Interactions Among Offenders: A Latent Space Approach For Interdependent Ego-Networks, Isabella Gollini, Alberto Caimo, Paolo Campana

Articles

Illegal markets are notoriously difficult to study. Police data offer an increasingly exploited source of evidence. However, their secondary nature poses challenges for researchers. A key issue is that researchers often have to deal with two sets of actors: targeted and non-targeted. This work develops a latent space model for interdependent ego-networks purposely created to deal with the targeted nature of police evidence. By treating targeted offenders as egos and their contacts as alters, the model (a) leverages on the full information available and (b) mirrors the specificity of the data collection strategy. The paper then applies this approach to …

Sustainable Energy Governance In South Tyrol (Italy): A Probabilistic Bipartite Network Model, Jessica Belest, Laura Secco, Elena Pisani, Alberto Caimo

Articles

At the national scale, almost all of the European countries have already achieved energy transition targets, while at the regional and local scales, there is still some potential to further push sustainable energy transitions. Regions and localities have the support of political, social, and economic actors who make decisions for meeting existing social, environmental and economic needs recognising local specificities.

These actors compose the sustainable energy governance that is fundamental to effectively plan and manage energy resources. In collaborative relationships, these actors share, save, and protect several kinds of resources, thereby making energy transitions deeper and more effective.

This research …

Does It Take Three To Dance The Tango? Organizational Design, Triadic Structures And Boundary Spanning Across Subunits, Stefano Tasselli, Alberto Caimo

Articles

In this paper, we investigate the processes of boundary spanning across subunits within organizational networks. We hypothesize that patterns of advice across organizational subunits are explained by different triadic mechanisms depending on the organizational design of the intra-organizational network. In organizational networks characterized by flat hierarchy, we found triadic cyclic closure to be positively associated to boundary spanning across subunits; but when the network reflects an organizational structure with formal hierarchical differentiation among members, then we found triadic transitive closure to be associated to boundary spanning across subunits. We test these predictions in two empirical studies consisting of two organizational …

Multi-Algorithmic Cryptography Using Deterministic Chaos With Applications To Mobile Communications, Jonathan Blackledge

Articles

In this extended paper, we present an overview of the principal issues associated with cryptography, providing historically significant examples for illustrative purposes as part of a short tutorial for readers that are not familiar with the subject matter. This is used to introduce the role that nonlinear dynamics and chaos play in the design of encryption engines which utilize different types of Iteration Function Systems (IFS). The design of such encryption engines requires that they conform to the principles associated with diffusion and confusion for generating ciphers that are of a maximum entropy type. For this reason, the role of …