Russell C. Thomas- George Mason University
Russell C. Thomas
- George Mason University
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12
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Publications
Publications (12)
Institutions are the ‘rules of the game’ that give structure and meaning to social life. Institutional innovation is a long and complex social process, and is much less well understood than technological innovation. In this chapter, we explore how an engineering approach to the process of institutional innovation might influence the trajectory or r...
Turchin et al. (1) use an agent-based model (ABM) to evaluate the hypothesis “…that the diffusion of horse-related military technologies from the steppe-sown interface to the rest of Afroeurasia results in a characteristic spatiotemporal pattern of spread of intense forms of warfare, leading to macrostate forms of political organization.” Because o...
This report proposes a formal version of Boisot's Information Space (I-space) framework and Social Learning Cycle (SLC) theory to support research in social learning in innovation communities, broadly defined. The benefit of a formal framework is that it will enable more systematic empirical research and also computer modeling.
This paper proposes an analysis framework and model for estimating the impact of information security breach episodes. Previous methods either lack empirical grounding or are not sufficiently rigorous, general or flexible. There has also been no consistent model that serves theoretical and empirical research, and also professional practice. The pro...
This paper presents the results of computational experiments on the effects of social influence on individual and systemic behavior of situated cognitive agents in a product-consumer environment. Paired experiments were performed with identical initial conditions to compare social agents with non-social agents. Experiment results show that social a...
Information security is often called an 'arms race', but little is known about the co-evolutionary dynamics of innovation. To facilitate such research, we define two formal methods that can be executed by computational agents in a multi-agent system. First, we formalize the definition of capabilities and business models as a 'viable system'. We gen...
Information security has been commonly viewed as a rivalry between attackers and defenders, and it has been popularly described as an evolutionary arms race where each side has incentives to continually create new innovations to overcome the opponent’s capabilities. In doing so, neither side gains a lasting advantage (i.e. the Red Queen effect). Fr...
This is an extended abstract of the presentation of the same title for the Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research Workshop, 2009.
Many problems in cyber trust exist at least partially because the people and institutions involved are not properly motivated to solve them. The incentives are often perverse, misaligned, or missing. By improving economic, social, and personal incentives, cyber trust can be significantly improved. The incentive-based approach is based on modern ent...
Traditional return on investment analysis techniques like discounted cash flow (DCF) and net present value (NPV) fall short of providing adequate decision support in today’s turbulent environment. New techniques, grouped under the concept called “business value analysis” (BVA), show promise. These techniques include intellectual capital, real optio...
Questions
Question (1)
the DGS is an adaptation of Holland's Learning Classifier System with Tagged Urns and some additional structure. I'm interested in using it to model socio-technical systems related to information security, privacy, confidentiality, homeland defense, etc. Please share references to published papers or working papers, if possible. I will be coding in Mathematica for prototype, then in Java (or maybe Python) for production.
