Scaling Laws Governing the Complexity of Global Political Event Evolutions

Speaker: Jianbo Gao
Affiliation: Guangxi University

Abstract: Political processes generated by daily events around the world evolve in highly complicated patterns, alternating between expected and surprising emergent structures. Can mathematical and empirically validated social theories help us uncover fundamental laws governing the evolution of political systems and processes? Can they provide evidence-based insights for improving policies? These tantalizing ideas can now be systematically tested, thanks to the advent of digitized massive archival news data. Using statistical and random fractal approaches, we show that three fundamental laws exist, including Zipf-Mandelbrot law governing a country’s activity, exponential law governing resource allocation associated with international relations, and long-range correlations underlying the evolution of political events. An information theoretic approach is also developed to derive a world-wide political “heat map” with a high temporal resolution.

Biography:  Jianbo Gao received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UCLA in 2000, taught at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Florida (Gainesville), and collaborated with the Air Force Research Lab at Dayton Ohio, as a research Professor at Wright State University. He specializes in sophisticated physical and mathematical techniques to solve data-driven real-world problems in electrical engineering, bioengineering, finance, and the geo- and environmental sciences. He is a leading expert on multiscale analysis and nonlinear time series analysis. His book, “Multiscale Analysis of Complex Time Series: Integration of Chaos and Random Fractal Theory, and Beyond“, is the first of its kind, and a highly praised book in the field.  From 2004 to 2006, he was an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering and Signal Processing. Since 2013, he has been a Distinguished Professor and founding director of Institute of Complexity Science and Big Data Technology at Guangxi University, researching on dynamical  evolution of world-wide political conflicts, modeling of global terrorism, forewarning  of systemic risks and policy shocks in finance, and developing novel medical  informatics tools for clinical use.

For more information, contact Prof. Vwani Roychowdhury (vwani@ee.ucla.edu)

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Apr 21, 2016
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Location:
E-IV Maxwell Room #57-124
420 Westwood Plaza - 5th Flr. , Los Angeles CA 90095