Projects

Projects - HS 2011

The research project is the core part of this course. Students are required to implement an established mathematical model from the (sociological or related) literature in MATLAB. The final grade in the course is based on a 15 min. oral presentation and a written 30-40 pages report (including source code) detailing the project.

The project work may be completed in groups of one to three people - we recommend to work at least in pairs such that the work load for each student is not too large. Project topic suggestions with literature reference will be made available below. There will be enough time to select a project among the suggested topics or a topic of a student's choice that is in accordance with the framework of the course. Students are then asked to submit a short proposal detailing their intended research project; a template for the project proposal will be made available below.

Timeline

The timeline for your project work is as follows:

• find a topic you are interested in and a group of students you would like to work with (please use the course mailing list to ask for project partners)

• please consult the list below for project suggestion; we also provide a number of links to data sets that are available online and that might serve as the basis of your self-chosen research topic

• starting on Monday, October 10th 2011, you have two weeks to submit your (short and concise) project proposal
  

• final deadline for submitting the project proposal and signing up for a project is Monday, October 24th 2011

• the template for the proposal is provided below; purpose of the proposal is to ensure that you are on the right track with your project ideas

• Note: signing up for a project and dropping out of the course/not handing in a seminar thesis is no problem; the binding registration for receiving credits in the course will be done when signing up for the final oral presentations

• as soon as you have submitted your research proposal and you have received our feedback you may start working on the project - the earlier you start, the better!

Download: proposal template (.docx, .doc)

Project Suggestions - HS 2011

Please find below the alphabetical list of projects topics we suggest this term. Each zip-archive contains one or several papers on the respective topic.

If you have an interesting project idea not listed below that you would like to realize, please approach us with a short but conclusive description of your project idea and provide us with the paper(s) you would like to base the project on.

01 - Traffic Dynamics

02 - Civil Violence

03 - Collective Behavior

04 - Disaster Spreading

05 - Emergence of Conventions

06 - Emergence of Cooperation

07 - Emergence of Norms and Culture

08 - Emergence of Values

09 - Evacuation Bottleneck

10 - Friendship Network Formation

11 - Innovation Diffusion

12 - Interstate Conflict

13 - Language Formation

14 - Learning

15 - Opinion Formation

16 - Pedestrian Dynamics

17 - Self-organized Criticality

18 - Social Networks Evolution

19 - Task Allocation & Division of Labor

20 - Artificial Financial Markets

21 - Desert Ant Behavior

22 - Trail Formation

23 - Wikipedia

24 - Social Contagion

25 - Facebook

"Sponsored" Projects topics:*

26 - Sequential Investment Game

27 - Modeling (Peer) Review in Science

28 - Modeling Science

29 - Simulations of Networks in Science

30 - Opinion Dynamics in Science

31 - Organizational Learning

* sponsored means that these topics are active research at SOMS or DBGT (Decision and Behavioral Game Theory) chairs and projects in these areas are highly welcome. Students who decide to engage in these topics may receive extra support throughout the course.

Datasets

The following data is available online; for a complete list please click here.

Bloomberg
International real-time data provider for decision makers in finance, business and government.
http://www.bloomberg.com/

Maddison Data
Historical statistics about GDP and population data.
http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/

World Bank
The World Bank Data Catalog provides download access to over 2,000 socio-economic indicators from World Bank data sets.
http://data.worldbank.org/

International Monetary Found
The IMF publishes a range of time series data on IMF lending, exchange rates and other economic and financial indicators.
http://www.imf.org/external/data.htm

Living Science
Living Science is a real time global science observatory based on publications submitted to arXiv.org. It covers real time (daily) submissions of publications in areas as diverse as Physics, Astronomy, Computer Science, Mathematics and Quantitative Biology. Currently, contents are dynamically updated each day. Living Science is a powerful analysis tool to identify the magnitude and impact of scientific work worldwide.
http://www.livingscience.ethz.ch/

CPSR of the University of Michigan
ICPSR offers more than 500,000 digital files containing social science research data. Disciplines represented include political science, sociology, demography, economics, history, gerontology, criminal justice, public health, foreign policy, terrorism, health and medical care, early education, education, racial and ethnic minorities, psychology, law, substance abuse and mental health, and more.
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/

UK Data Center of the University of Essex
The UK's largest collection of digital research data in the social sciences and humanities.
http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/

World Value Survey
The World Value Survey provides data about values and cultural changes in societies all over the world.
http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/

CSCW Data on Armed Conflict
CSCW and Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, have collaborated in the production of a dataset of armed conflicts, both internal and external, in the period 1946 to the present. Currently, probably the most extensive dataset repository available, in particular for historic data.
http://www.prio.no/CSCW/Datasets/Armed-Conflict/

ACLED
Partially contained in the PRIO dataset, ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Events Dataset) is designed for disaggregated conflict analysis and crisis mapping. This dataset codes the location of all reported conflict events in 50 countries in the developing world. Data are currently being coded from 1997 to 2009 and the pro ject continues to backdate conflict information for African states to the year of independence.
http://www.acleddata.com/

Project Reports - FS 2011

The files below contain an assortment of project reports from the previous semester. Please look through some of the reports to get an idea for the kind of work we are expecting from you. Note that we are very aware of the projects that have been previously completed in the course and we want to remind you that copying of previously submitted work will result in automatic failure of the course.

Opinion formation by "employed agents" in social networks - Author(s): S. Brugger, C. Schwirzer

Trails of Irchelpark. How students walk - Author(s): M. Buehlmann, A. Beitler

Facebook, for Fun and Profit - Author(s): S. Constantinescu, D. Tortel

Pedestrian Dynamics Airplane Evacuation Simulation - Author(s): P. Heer, L. Bühler

Evacuation Bottleneck: Simulation and analysis of an evacuation of a lecture room with MATLAB - Author(s): D. Biner, N. Brun

Simulation of Human Trail Systems in Parks - Author(s): M. Frei, A. Gaemperli

Analysis of Packet Transportation Systems with a Focus on Buffer Systems and Blockades - Author(s): L. Cavigelli, P. Hager, C. Schürch

Agent-based Modeling of Language Evolution - Author(s): M. Gomez, S. Menberg

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