̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - network

Cambridge launches UK’s first quantum network

sc604 — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 10:46:23 +0000

̽��ֱ��‘metro’ network provides secure quantum communications between the Electrical Engineering Division at West Cambridge, the Department of Engineering in the city centre and Toshiba Research Europe Ltd (TREL) on the Cambridge Science Park.

Quantum links are so secure because they rely on particles of light, or photons, to transmit encryption keys through the optical fibre. Should an attacker attempt to intercept the communication, the key itself changes through the laws of quantum mechanics, rendering the stolen data useless.

Researchers have been testing the ultra-secure network for the last year, providing stable generation of quantum keys at rates between two and three megabits per second. These keys are used to securely encrypt data, both in transit and in storage. Performance has exceeded expectations, with the highest recorded sustained generation of keys in field trials that include encryption of data in multiple 100-gigabit channels.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge network is a project of the Quantum Communications Hub, a consortium of eight UK universities, as well as private sector companies and public sector stakeholders. ̽��ֱ��network was built by Hub partners including the ̽��ֱ��’s Electrical Engineering Division and TREL, who also supplied the Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) systems. Further input came from ADVA, who supplied the optical transmission equipment, and the ̽��ֱ��’s Granta Backbone Network, which provided the optical fibre.

̽��ֱ��UK Quantum Network is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through the UK’s National Quantum Technologies Programme. It brings together concentrations of research excellence and innovation, facilitating greater collaboration between the two in development of applications that exploit the unique formal guarantee of security provided by quantum physics.

“Through this network, we can further improve quantum communications technologies and interoperability, explore and develop applications and services, and also demonstrate these to potential end users and future customers,” said Professor Timothy Spiller of the ̽��ֱ�� of York, and Director of the Quantum Communications Hub.

“ ̽��ֱ��development of the UK Quantum Network has already led to a much greater understanding of the potential of this technology in secure applications in a range of fields, in addition to bringing new insights into the operation of the systems in practice,” said Professor Ian White from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. “I have no doubt that the network will bring many benefits in the future to researchers, developers and users.”

“Working with the Quantum Communications Hub, Cambridge and ADVA has allowed us to develop an interface for delivering quantum keys to applications,” said Dr Andrew Shields, Assistant Director of Toshiba Research Europe Ltd. “In the coming years, the network will be an important resource for developing new applications and use cases.”

“Development of the network has brought together in the Quantum Communications Hub partnership many world-class researchers and facilities from both UK universities and industry,” said Dr Liam Blackwell, Head of Quantum Technologies at EPSRC. “This is a reflection of EPSRC’s commitment to investing in UK leadership in advanced research and innovation in quantum technologies.”

̽��ֱ��UK’s first quantum network was launched today in Cambridge, enabling ‘unhackable’ communications, made secure by the laws of physics, between three sites around the city.

̽��ֱ��development of the UK Quantum Network has already led to a much greater understanding of the potential of this technology in secure applications in a range of fields.

Ian White

Christopher Burns

Fiber Optic

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Human smugglers operate as ‘independent traders’, study finds

fpjl2 — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 00:59:42 +0000

Latest research shows a lack of overarching coordination or the involvement of any “kingpin”-style monopolies in the criminal operations illegally transporting people from the Horn of Africa into Northern Europe via Libya.

Instead, transnational smuggling routes were found to be highly segmented: each stage a competitive marketplace of “independent and autonomous” smugglers – as well as militias and kidnappers – that must be negotiated by migrants fighting for a life beyond the Mediterranean Sea.

̽��ֱ��first “network analysis” of this booming criminal enterprise suggests that successful smugglers need a reputation among migrants – and that removing any individual smuggler will only result in rivals immediately seizing their “market share”.

Dr Paolo Campana from Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Institute of Criminology conducted the research using evidence from the 18-month investigation by Italian prosecutors that followed the Lampedusa shipwreck, in which 366 people lost their lives.

̽��ֱ��work included data from wiretapped telephone conversations between smugglers at all stages, testimonies collected from migrants, interviews with police task force members, and background information on offenders.

“ ̽��ֱ��smuggling ring moving migrants from the Horn of Africa to Northern Europe via Libya does not appear to have the thread of any single organisation running through it,” said Campana, whose findings are published today in the European Journal of Criminology.

“This is a far cry from how Mafia-like organisations operate, and a major departure from media reports claiming that shadowy kingpins monopolise certain routes.”

In fact, it was the Anti-Mafia unit with the Palermo Prosecutor’s Office initially tasked with investigating smuggling operations on both sides of the Mediterranean in the wake of the Lampedusa disaster in October 2013.

Campana points out that they found no evidence of any involvement from the Sicilian Mafia at the time, even through payment of protection money – despite Sicily being a key stage in the smuggling route.

̽��ֱ��two indictments prepared by the Palermo unit – totalling some 800 pages – formed a major part of the dataset Campana combed through to code all possible data points: references to times, names, events, exchanges, locations and so on.

Overall, 292 actors (not including migrants) were identified as part of the Lampedusa smuggling ring. 95% were male smugglers operating along the main route, from the Horn of Africa to the Nordic nations in northern Europe – where many migrants hoped to find refuge – via Libya and Italy.

However, the network also extended to Dubai, Israel, Canada, Turkey, Germany and the UK, and included those who kidnap for ransom in the deserts of Libya, and Tripoli militiamen who take bribes to let migrants out of detention centres.

“People specialise,” said Campana. “There was a clear separation between those providing smuggling services, those kidnapping for ransom, and those, like the militias, ‘governing’ spaces and supplying protection.”

He also detected signs of rudimentary hierarchy among smugglers in some stages of the route, which roughly divide into ‘organiser’ and ‘aide’.

“Organisers are individuals who give orders but don’t receive them, while aides are highly dependent on organisers for their activities. Organisers make up some 15% of the smuggling network and the remaining 85% occupy a lower ranking aide position.”

̽��ֱ��network models built by Campana show that those who operate in the same stage of the journey are almost seven times more likely to have some link with each other. “Even in a network that traverses the hemispheres, it is the local dimension that is still crucial,” he said.

Moreover, Campana found that those who share the same network position as either organiser or aide are three times less likely to have any tie. “There is little contact between fellow organisers, reinforcing the impression of smugglers as free-trading independents. Business opportunities tear coordination apart,” he said.

Indeed, a focused analysis of a sub-network of 28 smugglers revealed that those based in Italy who tapped directly into the Libyan ‘marketplace’ had very little contact with each other.

Wiretaps and testimonials suggest that migrants have to pay separate vendors for each leg of the journey. Payment was often done in advance though Hawala, an informal money transfer system based on trust.

One wiretap reveals a charge of $3600 for a couple to cross the Mediterranean. Another wiretapped smuggler charges €150 per person for a car trip from Sicily to Rome.

“Reputation is crucial in a competitive market, and the wiretaps show how much value smugglers place on their reputation,” said Campana.

One smuggler was recorded reproaching another for overcrowding a boat, comparing it to the way a dirty bathroom reflects badly on everyone who shares the house.

In fact, the wiretaps reveal that the loss of life in the Lampedusa disaster led to compensation being paid to families by smugglers scared of losing future business.

“Authorities may wish to deliberately tarnish the reputation of smugglers in order to shut down their business,” said Campana.

“Criminal justice responses require the adoption of coordinated tactics involving all countries along the route to target these localised clusters of offenders simultaneously.

“This is a market driven by exponential demand, and it is that demand which should be targeted. Land-based policies such as refugee resettlement schemes are politically difficult, but might ultimately prove more fruitful in stemming the smuggling tide than naval operations.”

First study to model the organisation behind trade in illegal border crossings shows no “Mafia-like” monopoly of routes from Africa into Europe via Mediterranean. Instead, myriad independent smugglers compete in open markets that have emerged at every stage of the journey.

This is a far cry from how Mafia-like organisations operate

Paolo Campana

Noborder Network

Migrants arriving on the island of Lampedusa.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Target ‘best connected neighbours’ to stop spread of infection in developing countries

fpjl2 — Mon, 24 Jul 2017 19:04:04 +0000

Our lives benefit from social networks: the contact and dialogue between family, friends, colleagues and neighbours. However these networks can also cost lives by transmitting infection or misinformation, particularly in developing nations.

In fact, when there is an outbreak of disease, or of damaging rumour that hinders uptake of vaccination, the network through which it spreads needs to be broken up – and fast.

But who are the people with most connections – the ‘hubs’ in any social network – that should be targeted with inoculating drugs or health education in order to quickly isolate a contagion?

Information about social networks in rural villages in the developing world is costly and time-consuming to collect, and usually unavailable. So current immunisation strategies target people with established community roles: healthcare workers, teachers, and local officials.

Now, Cambridge researchers have for the first time combined networking theories with ‘real world’ data collected from thousands of rural Ugandan households, and shown that a simple algorithm may be significantly more effective at finding the highly connected ‘hubs’ to target for halting disease spread.

̽��ֱ��‘acquaintance algorithm’ employed by researchers is remarkably simple: select village households at random and ask who in their network is most trusted for medical advice.

Researchers were surprised to find that the most influential people in social networks were very often not those with obvious positions in a community. As such, these valuable ‘hubs’ are invisible to drug administration programmes without the algorithmic approach.

“Everyone is a node in a social network. Most nodes have just a few connections. However, a small number of nodes have the majority of connections. These are the hubs we want to uncover and target in order to intentionally cause failure in social networks spreading pathogens or damaging behaviour,” says lead researcher Dr Goylette Chami, from Cambridge’s Department of Pathology.

“It was striking to find that important village positions may be best left untargeted for interventions seeking to stop the spread of pathogens through a rural social network,” says Chami.

In the study, published today in the journal PNAS, the researchers write that this simple strategy could be particularly effective for isolating households that refuse to take medicine, so that they don’t endanger the rest of a community with infection.

To control disease caused by parasitic worm infections, for example, at least three quarters of any given community need to be treated. “ ̽��ֱ��refusal of treatment by a few people can result in the destabilisation of mass drug administration programmes that aim to treat 1.9 billion people worldwide,” says Chami.

An average of just 32% of households (‘nodes’) selected by the acquaintance algorithm need to be provided health education (and ‘removed’ from a network) to reach the disease control threshold for an entire community. Using traditional role-based targeting, the average needed is much larger: some 54%.

“We discovered that acquaintance algorithms outperformed the conventional field-based approaches of targeting well-established community roles for finding individuals with the most connections to sick people, as well as isolating the spread of misinformation,” says Chami

“Importantly, this simple strategy doesn’t require any information on who holds which role and how to reach them. No database is needed. As such, it is easy to deploy in rural, low-income settings.”

“In an ideal world, everyone would be treated,” says Chami. “However, with limited resources, time and information, finding the best connected neighbours, the ‘hubs’, and removing them through treatment, looks to be the quickest way to fragment a network that spreads infections, and to render the most people safe.”

Chami and colleagues from Cambridge and the Ugandan Ministry of Health collected data on social and health advice networks from over 16,000 people in 17 villages across rural Uganda. They also collected data on networks of disease using reports of diarrhoea as a proxy for infection spread – particularly relevant to recent large-scale cholera outbreaks.

To do this, Chami built a survey app from open source code and loaded it on to 76 Google nexus tablets. ̽��ֱ��team then trained a number of individuals from the local villages to help them go door to door.

Adds Chami: “This kind of ‘network theory’ approach to public health in the developing world, and the use of acquaintance algorithms, if tested in randomised controlled trials, may increase compliance to treatments and inform strategies for the distribution of vaccines.”

An innovative new study takes a network theory approach to targeted treatment in rural Africa, and finds that a simple algorithm may be more effective than current policies, as well as easier to deploy, when it comes to preventing disease spread – by finding those with “most connections to sick people”.

Finding the best connected neighbours, the ‘hubs’, and removing them through treatment, looks to be the quickest way to fragment a network that spreads infections

Goylette Chami

A fishing village along Lake Victoria in the Mayuge District of Uganda, close to where researchers gathered data for the latest study.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Cooperative communities emerge in transparent social networks

fpjl2 — Mon, 09 Mar 2015 19:05:45 +0000

People in a society are bound together by a set of connections – a social network. Cooperation between people in the network is essential for societies to prosper, and the question of what drives the emergence and sustainability of cooperation is a fundamental one.

What we know about other people in a network informs how much we are willing to cooperate with them. By conducting a series of online experiments, researchers explored how two key areas of network knowledge effect cooperation in decision-making: what we know about the reputation and social connections of those around us.

In most social contexts, knowledge about others’ reputation – what we know about their previous actions – is limited to those we have immediate connections with: friends, neighbours and so on.

But the new study shows that if the reputation of everyone in a network is completely transparent – made common knowledge and visible to all – rather than limited to the individuals who are directly connected, the level of cooperation across the overall network almost doubles. ̽��ֱ��network also becomes denser and more clustered (so your connections tend to be connected with each other).

̽��ֱ��researchers also tested how transparency of social connections in the group influences cooperation. On its own, common knowledge of social connections had little impact on overall levels of cooperation.

However, when the researchers combined transparency of social connections with transparency of everyone’s reputation, a community of the most cooperative formed. Members of the community actively removed links from less cooperative individuals and refused their proposals to reconnect.

Researchers found that belonging to the community of cooperators is profitable. Each interaction in the cooperative community is 23% more beneficial than the equivalent interaction in the less cooperative community.

̽��ֱ��study is published today in the journal PNAS, and was conducted by Cambridge and Oxford researchers.

“We show that knowing others’ past actions is the key driver of a high contribution level. Additionally, knowing who is connected to whom matters for the distribution of contributions: it allows contributors to form their own community,” said study author Dr Edoardo Gallo, from the Faculty of Economics and Queens’ College at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

“This finding suggests that in a world where social information is more available, people may increasingly insulate themselves in communities with other like-minded individuals. In the case we examined, belonging to the community of contributors is highly beneficial,” he said.

̽��ֱ��research sheds light on the problem of ‘public good’ provision: what motivates people to make costly actions towards a good that benefits everyone, even those who do not contribute to it. Perhaps the most defining example of ‘public good’ in the modern era is the preservation of our environment.

Gallo, along with Oxford colleague Chang Yan, devised an online experiment involving people forming connections and playing a ‘game’ of public good provision, also popularly known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

First, the participants in a group can freely form connections with each other which determine the network. After the network is formed, each individual decides whether to cooperate by contributing to a public good that only benefits their neighbours in the network.

Contributing benefits all the neighbours, but it is costly to the contributor. Not cooperating by not contributing, however, is costless.

̽��ֱ��best possible outcome for the group is for everyone to contribute. However, each individual has an incentive not to contribute: they can gain the benefits from others’ contributions without paying any cost themselves.

̽��ֱ��researchers recruited 364 people from crowdsourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk to play several rounds of a network formation game followed by a public good game. They investigated four treatments that varied the amount of knowledge subjects have about the network and previous actions of others.

When the reputation (previous actions) of everyone in the network was rendered transparent, the overall levels of cooperation were almost twice as high as when only the previous actions of immediate connections were known.

When the social connections for the entire network were also revealed to all, the cooperators formed their own community, leaving those with a history of being uncooperative out in the cold.

Gallo points out that whether the community formation – the insulating and ostracizing – that occurred in the transparent network is a desirable outcome depends on the nature of the behaviour that leads to the separation.

“In the experiment, the ‘good’ cooperators ostracize the ‘bad’ defectors, but one can argue the defectors brought it on themselves with their actions. If the same pattern occurred because of another more neutral behaviour, like an accent when speaking a language, then the ostracization might be undesirable for society,” Gallo said.

An online experiment reveals that the overall level of cooperation in a group almost doubles when the previous actions of all its members are rendered transparent. When all social connections within the group are also made transparent, the most cooperative band together to form their own community – ostracizing the less cooperative.

This finding suggests that in a world where social information is more available, people may increasingly insulate themselves in communities with other like-minded individuals

Edoardo Gallo

Marina del Castell

Cooperation

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How can we protect our information in the era of cloud computing?

sc604 — Mon, 26 Jan 2015 06:07:03 +0000

In an article published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, Professor Jon Crowcroft argues that by parcelling and spreading data across multiple sites, and weaving it together like a tapestry, not only would our information be safer, it would be quicker to access, and could potentially be stored at lower overall cost.

̽��ֱ��internet is a vast, decentralised communications system, with minimal administrative or governmental oversight. However, we increasingly access our information through cloud-based services, such as Google Drive, iCloud and Dropbox, which are very large centralised storage and processing systems. Cloud-based services offer convenience to the user, as their data can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection, but their centralised nature can make them vulnerable to attack, such as when personal photos of mostly young and female celebrities were leaked last summer after their iCloud accounts were hacked.

Storing information in the cloud makes it easily accessible to users, while removing the burden of managing it; and the cloud’s highly centralised nature keeps costs low for the companies providing the storage. However, centralised systems can lack resilience, meaning that service can be lost when any one part of the network access path fails.

Centralised systems also give a specific point to attack for those who may want to access them illegally. Even if data is copied many times, if all the copies have the same flaw, they are all vulnerable. Just as a small gene pool places a population at risk from a change in the environment, such as a disease, the lack of variety in centralised storage systems places information at greater risk of theft.

̽��ֱ��alternative is a decentralised system, also known as a peer-to-peer system, where resources from many potential locations in the network are mixed, rather than putting all one’s eggs in one basket.

̽��ֱ��strength of a peer-to-peer system is that its value grows as the number of users increases: all producers are also potential consumers, so each added node gives the new producer as many customers as are already on the network.

“Since all the members of a peer-to-peer network are giving as well as consuming resources, it quickly overtakes a centralised network in terms of its strength,” said Crowcroft, of the ̽��ֱ��’s Computer Laboratory.

̽��ֱ��higher reliability and performance of fibre to the home, the availability of 4G networks, and IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) are all helping to make decentralised networks viable. In practice, a user would carry most of the data they need to access immediately with them on their mobile device, with their home computer acting as the ‘master’ point of contact.

“Essentially, data is encoded redundantly, but rather than making many copies, we weave a tapestry using the bits that represent data, so that threads making up particular pieces of information are repeated but meshed together with threads making up different pieces of information,” said Crowcroft. “Then to dis-entangle a particular piece of information, we need to unpick several threads.”

Varying the ways that our information is stored or distributed is normally done to protect against faults in the network, but it can also improve the privacy of our data. In a decentralised system where data is partitioned across several sites, any attacker attempting to access that data has a much more complex target – the attacker has to know where all bits of the information are, as opposed to using brute force at one point to access everything. “ ̽��ֱ��more diversity we use in a peer-to-peer system, the closer we get to an ideal in terms of resilience and privacy,” said Crowcroft.

A peer-to-peer system could also be built at a lower overall cost than a centralised system, argues Crowcroft, since no ‘cache’ is needed in order to store data near the user. To the end user, costs could be as low as a pound per month, or even free, much lower than monthly internet access costs or mobile tariffs.

“We haven’t seen massive take-up of decentralised networks yet, but perhaps that’s just premature,” said Crowcroft. “We’ve only had these massive centralised systems for about a decade, and like many other utilities, the internet will most likely move away from centralisation and towards decentralisation over time, especially as developments in technology make these systems attractive for customers.”

Private information would be much more secure if individuals moved away from cloud-based storage towards peer-to-peer systems, where data is stored in a variety of ways and across a variety of sites, argues a ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researcher.

̽��ֱ��more diversity we use in a peer-to-peer system, the closer we get to an ideal in terms of resilience and privacy

Jon Crowcroft

g4ll4is

Privacy

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Home from home: minor moves make major differences

lw355 — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 13:39:41 +0000

It was no coincidence that house price rises, increased housing transactions and a surge in employment within the property industry were seen as signs of an upturn in the economy late last summer. One in four new jobs created in the previous 12 months, it emerged from data produced by the Office for National Statistics, were in the housing sector. Our homes are more than our castles: they are, in many ways, the lifeblood of the economy.

Behind the jibes branding Britain as a nation of estate agents is a highly significant fact. On average, more than half of the moves we make in our lifetimes are within roughly 5 km of our previous addresses. ̽��ֱ��term migration conjures up an image of large distances – crossing national boundaries or even continents – but the moves we undertake most frequently are much more local and are often motivated by the desire to make what might be seen as relatively minor adjustments to how we live.

At first glance there is nothing remarkable about moving just a few streets or to accommodation with three bedrooms rather than two – or to downsize from a house to an apartment. But the importance of this internal mobility should not, however, be underestimated, either in terms of what these moves mean to the people involved or how they contribute to the bigger picture of local and regional economies.

These aspects of internal migration – and others – are of great interest to Professor Jacqueline Scott and Dr Rory Coulter from the Department of Sociology. Together they are collaborating on research that explores the links between residential mobility (or immobility), life events and household changes, and exchanges of social support within families.

In the early 1990s Scott was responsible for the initial design and implementation of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) – a hugely important resource for the study of changing family and household structures that was begun while she was at the ̽��ֱ�� of Essex. Her research interests include inter-generational relations and shifting gender roles. Coulter, whose PhD focused on the links between moving desires and subsequent moving behaviour, describes his key interest as “the interactions between people and places – how people shape places, and conversely how places shape people”.

Their research into internal migration aims to get to the heart of why we move, when we move, and what those moves mean in terms of the small but vitally important details of our lives. Where we live, and how close (or distant) we are to the people and places most significant in our day-to-day lives, play a huge part in our well-being. A move closer to the station, to the catchment area of a particular school or to a preferred neighbourhood, for instance, may have important personal implications for opportunities for work, education and friendships. When taken with the moves made by others, this has wider implications for the provision of transport, schools and other businesses, services and facilities.

Data extrapolated from BHPS (1991–2008) and its successor survey, Understanding Society, which is run from the ̽��ֱ�� of Essex’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and funded primarily by the Economic and Social Research Council, can give us the much-needed human angle on internal migration. We know, for example, that moves peak early in young adulthood (18–30), and that the frequency of moving declines rapidly after age 35. We know too that changing family trajectories impact on household size and thus on housing demand. But much more remains to be discovered about the finer details of decision-making surrounding internal migration.

As Coulter explained: “Data from panel surveys like BHPS are an incredibly rich resource for studying residential mobility. For example, using BHPS we are able to model exactly when people move home. We can estimate how having a baby affects how likely a couple are to move, as well as the type of dwelling and neighbourhood they choose to move to.

“By enabling us to model the timing of job changes and residential moves, BHPS data also allow us to study how people use residential mobility to co-ordinate their work and family life. In addition, because many panel surveys like BHPS interview every member of selected households, we are able to get multiple people’s perspectives on each relocation event. This allows us to explore which partner’s preferences have the strongest effects on a couple’s moving behaviour, as well as how moves affect the social networks of adults and their children”.Scott is particularly interested in the relationship between residential mobility – or immobility – and family support networks. This includes looking at how gender affects household moving decisions and who benefits and gains most when a household makes (or does not make) a residential move.

̽��ֱ��past 30 years or so have seen families disperse across greater distances as a result of employment change (for example, the decline of traditional industries and the growth of service sector employment) and the expansion of higher education. However, falling levels of state support combined with the demands of an aging population and political aspirations to increase female employment mean that support from family remains a vital aspect of well-being for many people.

“Given that informal networks for supplying and receiving many forms of support (such as childcare from family members) require people to live nearby to each other, it’s surprising that relatively little is known about how support exchanges may influence and be configured by residential mobility behaviour in conjunction with changes in family structures,” said Scott.

One example might be the decisions that underlie elderly people moving to be closer to their children or, conversely, children moving to be closer to their elderly parents. Another might be to investigate how residential moves are prompted by other life events such as childbirth or union dissolution (divorce or relationship break-up).

“We hope that our work will throw light on the question of how residential mobility is linked to family transitions and the changing supply and receipt of social support over the course of people’s lives. ̽��ֱ��answer to this complex question is likely to be correspondingly complex. To tackle it we will draw on the rich longitudinal data collected by surveys such as BHPS over the last two decades,” said Scott.

“By providing evidence about the links between residential mobility and exchanges of social support within social and kin networks, we anticipate that our work could inform the planning and policy development decisions of a range of government bodies and non-governmental organisations.”

Most of the moves we make are within 5 km of our previous addresses, yet these short migrations are highly significant within individual lives. New research is looking at the links between residential mobility, life events and exchanges of social support within families.

By providing evidence about the links between residential mobility and exchanges of social support within social and kin networks, our work could inform planning and policy development decisions.

Jacqueline Scott

See Tatt Yeo

Housing estate

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̽��ֱ��meaning of emoticons

ns480 — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:00:25 +0000

Alex Davies, a Gates scholar at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, has created a visual map of the words associated with Twitter emoticons. It's not just the usual smiley and sad face emoticons whose meaning is fairly obvious and associated with words such as birthday, weekend and Friday and hospital, cold, stomach and pain respectively.

Other emoticons include:

^_^ This is associated with more immediate pleasures such as food and holidays. Words linked to it include shopping, lunch, dinner and chocolate. It is more associated with Asian Tweeters, but has begun to be used more in the West.

<3 This emoticon, which looks like a heart on its side, is associated with words such as love, music, amazing, proud, beautiful, thankful, Jesus and Justin.

:/ This generally denotes a half-awake, slightly annoyed state, associated with words such as shift, sleeping, busy, class and Monday.

-_- This emoticon is indicative of frustration and is associated with words such as dumb, lame, dick and bitch.

Davies says all the emoticons he has analysed have been around for at least as long as the Internet has been in existence, but some are less prevalent than others. Some were used exclusively in Asia, but have now spread to the West, and being adopted by particular groups.

Davies, who is studying for a PhD in Engineering with a focus on statistical modelling, says: “ ̽��ֱ��creation of new emoticons has essentially stopped, but the context and usage of existing ones is constantly evolving. Take for example Asian style emoticons, such as ^_^ (happy) and -_- (sad).

“Initially these were used almost exclusively by Asian online communities, but have slowly been adopted by different Western sub-cultures and have taken on subtly different meanings in these contexts. One way to visualise this usage is to visualise the words that are strongly associated with these emoticons. What is interesting is that two emoticons that essentially represent the same sentiment, such as :) and ^_^, actually differ substantially in how they are used, and we can see this in the images of the words.”

Davies has also published a list of the happiness/sadness of 7,500 common words on Twitter after he was approached at an international conference about his previous work on creating a Twitter map of happiness. He was asked if he could release a list of words so people could easily create systems that use sentiment analysis of Twitter.

Davies says: “Twitter contains a wealth of sentiment information which researchers and businesses are very interested to explore so they can assess the changing global mood on different issues in real time and make predictions based on this.”

̽��ֱ��emoticons used on Twitter are a language in themselves and are taking on new and often surprising meanings of their own, according to new research.

Initially these were used almost exclusively by Asian online communities, but have slowly been adopted by different Western sub-cultures and have taken on subtly different meanings in these contexts.

Alex Davies

Candie_N from Flickr

smiley

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CRASSH: convener and gateway to the humanities

lw355 — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 15:18:07 +0000

Now reaching the end of its first decade at Cambridge, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) – once a fragile newcomer with a controversial moniker – has established itself as a focus for humanities activity, while its post-modern acronym has won international name-recognition.

CRASSH was conceived as a way to create interdisciplinary dialogue across the ̽��ֱ��’s many faculties and departments in the arts, social sciences and humanities. It brings together early career researchers, established faculty members and visiting scholars – for research groups, workshops, colloquia, lectures and conferences – across an array of established and emerging fields.

Indispensible to the research environment, it serves at once as a centripetal hub, drawing together different disciplinary perspectives, and as a centrifugal force for disseminating

new ideas. It provides a space for both reflection and interaction, where researchers can step beyond the frames of their disciplines.

Hunger for dialogue

As well as fostering interdisciplinarity, the Centre, with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has taken on the challenge of disciplinary innovation. Some of the most innovative work has originated in the Centre’s graduate/faculty research groups – currently spanning Endangered Languages, East European Memory Studies, GreenBRIDGE (sustainable architecture), the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Network, and the Science, Technology and Bio-Social Studies Forum.

Meanwhile long-running groups such as Cities, Post-Conflict Reconstruction and the Interdisciplinary Reproduction Forum continue to flourish, along with recent comers such as Late Antiquities, Health and Welfare, and Postcolonial Empires. Each year brings fresh proposals and new graduate cohorts.

Like the 20 or so conferences sponsored by CRASSH each year, research fora do more than challenge familiar disciplinary silos: they create collaborations from which fresh ideas and projects grow. Many of the conferences run by CRASSH – convened by early career researchers as well as established faculty – produce edited books; some form part of ongoing projects; others spearhead new initiatives and propel them forward to the next stage.

Research today involves networking, often internationally. But the term ‘network’ hardly begins to evoke the research culture engendered by face-to-face meetings and discussion. One of the discoveries made by the Centre at the outset was not just Cambridge researchers’ hunger for dialogue, but their need for a physical space where it could take place: a hospitable interdisciplinary location with common intellectual ownership.

Humanities world view

Recent CRASSH conferences have made an implicit argument for the importance of the humanities perspective and remind us how the world is changing before our eyes: forays into science like Have You Ever Seen a Molecule? Art, Science, and Visual Communication; attempts to grapple with modernity such as Understanding New Wars or Can I see your ID? Personhood and Paperwork in and after the Soviet Union; and, topical today, New Media/Alternative Politics: Communication Technologies and Political Change in the Middle East and Africa.

During 2009–10, a Mellon Sawyer seminar on Modelling Futures: Understanding Risk and Uncertainty ran throughout the year, with seminars on finance, health, environment, policy making and democracy, bringing together faculty from across the ̽��ֱ��, including the Statistical Laboratory, History and Philosophy of Science, Geography and the Cambridge Judge Business School.

This year’s Mellon-funded CRASSH conference in June, ̽��ֱ��Future ̽��ֱ��, will address urgent questions about the role of the humanities, including the arts and social sciences, in a modern technological university. ̽��ֱ��theme asks what universities are for – examining their evolving character and changing concerns in the digital age – a poignant theme at a time when cuts to university funding and fees threaten especially (but not only) the humanities.

For the Centre’s new theme kicking off at the start of the next academic year (see panel), we have selected visiting fellows from our largest ever application pool, along with new India and EUIAS fellows and two new Mellon postdoctoral fellows working on subjects relating to the theme. ̽��ֱ��generous support of the Mellon Foundation, the Newton Trust and the Charles Wallace India Trust has helped to establish CRASSH as an academic destination for researchers.

As the fellowship group grows, it becomes clearer than ever not only what our visitors gain from access to Cambridge research resources, but also how much they bring to Cambridge: the lively intellectual traffic that energises an international university.

Crystal-ball gazing

From the start, the CRASSH ethos has been strongly participatory. Even as the major research councils look for bigger and better research applications, they note the importance of the bubbling up of new ideas that lead to innovative work. CRASSH plays a part here, through competitive funding for graduate-led research groups, sponsorship of graduate-convened conferences, and Early Career Fellowships for Cambridge faculty beginning a new project. Our postdoctoral and early career fellows this year are working on projects that span terror and terrorism, complex simplicity in architecture, educational innovation and the economics of infectious diseases.

If one function of research is to keep us from forgetting the past – its achievements or its failures, its languages, histories and literary productions – another is to anticipate future concerns: energy, intergenerational justice, the environment; new forms of art, music and culture that cross media; new possibilities for peace as well as war; or new forms of human interaction, whether via digital media or ID papers.

Gateway to the humanities

̽��ֱ��vision that underpins CRASSH involves distance and engagement: both stepping outside one’s own discipline or institution, and getting together with like-minded (or unanticipated) collaborators. It aims at the indispensible combination of reflection and argument that gives rise to the best research.

Contact among opposed positions, the ability to learn from working with other people, bridging differences without conceding essential ground – these are facets of the ‘human’ face of the humanities that we teach and encourage through critical study and practice of humanities disciplines.

̽��ֱ��argument for the humanities made by CRASSH is that fresh thinking and innovation take place in the interaction between independent research and research collaboration, in the interstices of disciplines, and in the collaborative ethos and international perspective that characterise humanities research at its best. CRASSH aspires to provide this unique form of encounter: a gateway to the humanities.

For more information, please visit www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/

At CRASSH, researchers in the arts, humanities and social sciences have the opportunity to intersect, generating fresh thinking and innovation, as Director Professor Mary Jacobus explains.

̽��ֱ��vision that underpins CRASSH involves distance and engagement: both stepping outside one’s own discipline or institution, and getting together with like-minded collaborators.

Professor Mary Jacobus

andrewjstevens on flickr

Gateway

Transregional research in a transregional building

CRASSH’s next theme will be Cultures and Politics of the Transregional, responding to the need to approach ‘regionality’ from a humanities perspective.

Historically, geographical and legal borders have marked the reach of regional identities. But in an age of globalised movement, borders are constantly being crossed by the flow of travellers, by the transit of goods, by the transfer of new narratives and forms of language, and by the transmission of political and other ideas.

Flows across borders and the systems that control them are ever more large-scale and complex in character, and demand rethinking in interdisciplinary and comparative ways. With this focus in mind, Cultures and Politics of the Transregional, which runs for two years from the start of the academic year in 2011, will encompass a visiting fellowship scheme and a programme of interdisciplinary conferences, workshops and public lectures.

Fittingly, the theme coincides with a symbolic move to the ̽��ֱ��’s new humanities building at 7 West Road, where CRASSH will form part of an expanded international and cosmopolitan research community consisting of the regional studies Centres (African, Latin American, Mongolian and Inner Asian, and South Asian) and the Department of Politics and International Studies.

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