如故

###Research Questions   This page summarizes four projects lead by Lingfei Wu under the topic of “The Science of Attention” since summer 2015 (and we expect to have some primary results for publication at the end of 2015). The common goal of these studies is to understand the following questions:

What are the laws of attention dynamics ?

Can we exploit the power of human attention to develop “attention engine” and make machines as creative as human beings ?

What are the limitations of the intelligence of man-machine systems ?

These are big questions. We do not expect to address all of them in such a short period of time (half-year). But it is possible to find good angles to break these big questions into smaller ones that can be handled by research projects. These projects are designed to combine theoretical insights with practical consequences. Meanwhile, to demonstrate the interdisciplinary nature of attention science we select projects across different knowledge domains.

###Previous Findings   My previous studies, including collaborations with Jiang Zhang, Rob Ackland, and Marco Janssen, uncovered the following dynamics of attention:

1) The limitation of attention flow on the Web [1]; 2) The accelerating growth of attention as a power-law function of the number of active users in online communities [2][3][4][6]; 3) The fast decay of attention over time (stretched exponential function) [8]; 4) The re-production cycle of attention (attention loop and preferential return) [5][10]; 5) The decentralized tendency of attention allocation (reversed preferential attachment) [9].

###Open Science is Possible

These projects are interesting by themselves, but their impact goes beyond the scientific problems they are addressing. I use these projects to show that, open-science is not only possible, but really a much better way to do science. I got to know the collaborators of the above-listed projects in Swarm Agents Club (SAC) (see below a brief introduction of SAC). These collaborative studies are zero-cost in terms of data, software, and human resource, and are open to the entire scientific community since the birth of scientific ideas.

###Swarm Agents Club

Since 2008, we have been gathering a group of young Chinese scientists from different areas including physics, computer science, math, and biology to practice the idea of “open science”, in particular, scientific collaboration outside universities. The effort of SAC in promoting interdisciplinary communication and collaboration in the past seven years established its high reputation in China.

Currently SAC is run by two groups of core members working together towards the same goal of promoting open science, 1) 11 SAC cores who are responsible for dealing with daily routine activities such as hosting study groups and seminars, and 2) 4 global scientific committee members who are responsible for formulating and recommending academic and planning goals and initiatives for the club.

Besides the continuous input in hosting seminars in a Cafe in Beijing and maintaining an email list of 500+ professional members, our products now include 1 book on artificial intelligence, 1 APP using deep learning technique to predict weather at minute-level and meter resolution, which is providing service for 10+ million users, and many high-impact peer-review papers (e.g., Scientific Reports, CVPR, etc).

#####Reference

[1] Wu L. and R. Ackland (2014), How Web1.0 fails: The mismatch between hyperlinks and clickstreams, Social Network Analysis and Mining, 4: 202 – 206.

[2] Wu L. (2011), The accelerating growth of online tagging systems, European Physical Journal B, 83(2): 283-287.

[3] Wu L. and J. Zhang (2011), Accelerating growth and size-dependent distribution of human online activities, Physical Review E, 84 (2): 026113-026117.

[4] Wu, L., J. Zhang, and M. Zhao (2014), The metabolism and growth of web forums, PLoS ONE, 9(8): e102646.

[5] Zhang J. and L. Wu (2013), Allometry and dissipation of ecological networks, PLoS ONE, 8(9): e72525.

[6] Zhang J., X. Li, X. Wang, W. Wang, L. Wu (2015), Scaling behaviors in the growth of networked systems and their geometric origins, Scientific Reports, 5: 9767.

[7] Wu L. and J. Zhang (2013), The decentralized structure of collective attention on the Web, European Physical Journal B, 86(6): 266-277.

[8] C. Wang, L. Wu, J. Zhang, M. Janssen (2015), The Hidden Geometry of Attention Diffusion, Under Review.

[9] L. Wu, J. Baggio, M. Janssen (2015), The Dynamics of Collaborative Knowledge Production, Under Review.

[10] L. Wu and M. Janssen (2015), Attention as A Limited Resource in Digital Commons, Working Paper.