Our desire and fascination with intelligent machines dates back to the antiquity’s mythical automaton Talos, Aristotle’s mode of mechanical thought (syllogism) and Heron of Alexandria’s mechanical machines and automata. However, the quest for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is troubled with repeated failures of strategies and approaches throughout the history. This decade has seen a shift in interest towards bio-inspired software and hardware, with the assumption that such mimicry entails intelligence. Though these steps are fruitful in certain directions and have advanced automation, their singular design focus renders them highly inefficient in achieving AGI. Which set of requirements have to be met in the design of AGI? What are the limits in the design of the artificial? Here, a careful examination of computation in biological systems hints that evolutionary tinkering of contextual processing of information enabled by a hierarchical architecture is the key to build AGI.

Design of the Artificial: lessons from the biological roots of general intelligence
Nima Dehghani

Source: arxiv.org

From our most basic consumption to secondary needs, our spending habits reflect our life styles. Yet, in computational social sciences there is an open question about the existence of ubiquitous trends in spending habits by various groups at urban scale. Limited information collected by expenditure surveys have not proven conclusive in this regard. This is because, the frequency of purchases by type is highly uneven and follows a Zipf-like distribution. In this work, we apply text compression techniques to the purchase codes of credit card data to detect the significant sequences of transactions of each user. Five groups of consumers emerge when grouped by their similarity based on these sequences. Remarkably, individuals in each consumer group are also similar in age, total expenditure, gender, and the diversity of their social and mobility networks extracted by their mobile phone records. By properly deconstructing transaction data with Zipf-like distributions, we find that it can give us insights on collective behavior.

Sequence of purchases in credit card data reveal life styles in urban populations
Riccardo Di Clemente, Miguel Luengo-Oroz, Matias Travizano, Bapu Vaitla, Marta C. Gonzalez

Source: arxiv.org

Community detection, the decomposition of a graph into essential building blocks, has been a core research topic in network science over the past years. Since a precise notion of what constitutes a community has remained evasive, community detection algorithms have often been compared on benchmark graphs with a particular form of assortative community structure and classified based on the mathematical techniques they employ. However, this comparison can be misleading because apparent similarities in their mathematical machinery can disguise different goals and reasons for why we want to employ community detection in the first place. Here we provide a focused review of these different motivations that underpin community detection. This problem-driven classification is useful in applied network science, where it is important to select an appropriate algorithm for the given purpose. Moreover, highlighting the different facets of community detection also delineates the many lines of research and points out open directions and avenues for future research.

The many facets of community detection in complex networks
Michael T. SchaubEmail author, Jean-Charles Delvenne, Martin Rosvall and Renaud Lambiotte
Applied Network Science20172:4
DOI: 10.1007/s41109-017-0023-6

Source: appliednetsci.springeropen.com

Industrial development is the process by which economies learn how to produce new products and services. But how do economies learn? And who do they learn from? The literature on economic geography and economic development has emphasized two learning channels: inter-industry learning, which involves learning from related industries; and inter-regional learning, which involves learning from neighboring regions. Here we use 25 years of data describing the evolution of China’s economy between 1990 and 2015–a period when China multiplied its GDP per capita by a factor of ten–to explore how Chinese provinces diversified their economies. First, we show that the probability that a province will develop a new industry increases with the number of related industries that are already present in that province, a fact that is suggestive of inter-industry learning. Also, we show that the probability that a province will develop an industry increases with the number of neighboring provinces that are developed in that industry, a fact suggestive of inter-regional learning. Moreover, we find that the combination of these two channels exhibit diminishing returns, meaning that the contribution of either of these learning channels is redundant when the other one is present. Finally, we address endogeneity concerns by using the introduction of high-speed rail as an instrument to isolate the effects of inter-regional learning. Our differences-in-differences (DID) analysis reveals that the introduction of high speed-rail increased the industrial similarity of pairs of provinces connected by high-speed rail. Also, industries in provinces that were connected by rail increased their productivity when they were connected by rail to other provinces where that industry was already present. These findings suggest that inter-regional and inter-industry learning played a role in China’s great economic expansion.

Collective Learning in China’s Regional Economic Development
Jian Gao, Bogang Jun, Alex “Sandy” Pentland, Tao Zhou, Cesar A. Hidalgo

Source: arxiv.org