The LogiLogi Foundation

A very Dutch year at Oxford and Westminster...

2015-08-04T00:00:00Z

Dutch Society Committee Dinner

It keeps surprising me how much happens in an Oxford year. So many experiences, both great, and of the learning kind.

As president of the Oxford Dutch Society I was involved in organising a Dutch BOP (party) in the dining hall of St Cross College. The theme was the Flying Dutchman, and I got myself a hat to match ;)

Flying Dutchman BOP and some Dutch Wings

Besides that we also put on a Saint Niklas celebration (with an uncontroversial white Pete), a Kings Day celebration, and we topped it off with the Oxford World Picnic. An event attended by over 200 people from 8 other Oxford National Societies, including a full-sized Latin American band! It was organised through the Oxford Network of National Societies’ Committees, which I founded this year.

Dutch Society Kings Day and the Oxford World Picnic 2015

Over New Year, I organised the European Mensa Young New Year camp in Bristol. With 75 of us from all over Europe and beyond, we descended on the St Johns on-the-hill boarding school (complete with pool) for a week. It was pure fun with activities such as an Open Mike night, a Superheroes New Year Party, and Mensa Olympic Winter games, and lots and lots of hanging out with drinks till the morning light. Massive thanks to the great team that made it all possible and completelt stress-free; Maaike, Loes, Mikael, Menno, and Saif!

MYNY 2014/15, the New Years dinner

I rowed again this year as well, mostly during Hilary term (the 2nd term). We ‘smurfed’ our boat up one position!

Wolfson/St Cross smurfs after their last race of Torpids

Finally I did an Internship at the House of Lords, the UK’s finest political institution (if not democratic). As a researcher I was attached to the Lords’ Library this spring. It was a great experience being involved with real policy issues. I learned a lot about how politics works in the real world, in addition to at uni and through the Internet. Though foremostly it made me realise how much there is to learn… One can – and perhaps should – call politics many things, but boring it is not!

The House of Lords Library and the Thames Terrace

I’ve also had two papers accepted at the European Social Simulation conference. Interestingly – after being held in Barcelona last year – it will be in Groningen this September; which is where I did my undergrad: Reliving the good times!

Concluding the long year, is a great summer. With 10 days in Brest (France) with Mensa-Young, some time at home, and now a six-week long retreat on the Dutch isle of Vlieland, where I am working on my thesis, reading a few of those great books one normally never gets to, and enjoying nature; forests, the ocean, and plenty of sunshine.

I’m looking forward to the coming year. I will be organising a tad fewer things, and focus on work, my department and friends a bit more…

Hyperlapse of Oxford by Brendal Riley, a college-mate

AgentBase.org - Agent Based Simulation in the browser

2014-10-27T00:00:00Z

May I present to you: AgentBase.org. AgentBase allows you to do Agent Based Modeling (ABM) directly in the browser.

You can edit, save, and share models without installing any software or even reloading the page. Models are written in Coffeescript and use the AgentBase library.

You can edit and run models directly on AgentBase.org

You can also save, and share your models. Just share the (permanent) link of your model. Models are saved as GitHub Gists. GitHub provides an easy way to browse and compare earlier versions of source files, and also provides reliable storage, which ensures that models can be accessed even if AgentBase were to go offline. Finally, it also allows you to checkout and edit models on your own machine. You do need a GitHub account to be able to save models.

I built AgentBase.org as part of the Agent Based Modeling I am doing for my DPhil (PhD) thesis. There was no suitable toolset, or platform for sharing my models directly through the web, without requiring people to install software. For example NetLogo, which is a widely used toolset, is a desktop application.

I also seriously considered going with AgentScript. But AgentScript is heading more towards optimizing CPU performance than clarity and minimalism, and has ‘somewhat loose’ coding and testing standards. I used it as the basis for the AgentBase library, but took in a direction that makes sense for academic use.

That is: AgentBase is optimized for illustrative ABMs. Models can serve two main purposes. One is predictive, where one tries to make a model that resembles reality as closely as possible, as that helps you to make predictions with it. Such models are complex, and require high performance computing. Them being complicated and hard to understand does not matter, because in the end only their output numbers, the predictions do. Though not ABMs as such, weather forecast models are a good example of predictive models.

The other type of model, is the illustrative model. Illustrative models serve to demonstrate, communicate, or clarify processes to human observers. What matters for these models is their clarity, and how well they communicate the sociological, or other principle they were built to portray. For illustrative models the process, the model states, and agent-interactions matter, not the exact output.

From Thomas Schelling’s segregation model to Epsteins most cited works, the Agent Based Models most valued in the social sciences are illustrative. And because browsers are great for sharing illustrative models, but not for high powered computing, the ones that you’d likely want to run in a browser will be illustrative as well. AgentBase may thus be useful for you. But even if not, go forth and tinker ;)

Yet another lifetime-in-a-year

2014-08-21T00:00:00Z

Oxford Union committee Hilary Term 2014 (spring)

Another year in Oxford, and one that felt like it lasted a lifetime! To begin, I passed my transfer. Which is the first of 3 milestones of the Oxford PhD. It consists of a detailed research proposal + a defence of the methodology & approach. For those interested, it can be found here.

Secondly I’ve dabbled a tad more in Student politics, and after being on Library Committee, I was elected on Secretaries Committee at the Oxford Union last fall. This is the committee that does the actual work of inviting famous speakers, and preparing the rooms. Great fun to give a call to people such as Jean-Claude Trichet and Kermit the Frog. And this year I became Graduate Officer. I’ve won some, and lost some, and all in all the Union and it’s electoral process is quite fascinating; also from an observant sociologers’ perspective.

In addition I was secretary at my college’s student council (the MCR, or SRC as it is called at St Cross) and at the Oxford NWS Dutch Society. For them I co-organized a so called BOP, a large party for Oxford students – soccer-themed in this case; the “Hup Holland Hup” BOP (sadly it did not make a difference for the Dutch in the World Cup… ;).

I also became college representative at the boat-club. Boat-club; yes, because I started rowing last October. And the training paid off, because we won blades in the Oxford Summer 8’s bumps race. A bumps race is a race in which one literally has to bump/touch the boat ahead; all the boats are spaced out along the length of the river with about 1.5 boat-lengths between them, then they all start rowing simultaneously, and one has to ram the boat ahead, before the boat behind catches up with you. If a crew manages to do this on all 4 days of the race, they get blades. We did, jeeeh! To top it off, I bench-pressed 100kg this year.

Wolfson/St Cross winning blades at Summer 8’s 2014

Besides this, I went to a few conferences: the Analytical Sociology Conference in Stockholm, the Oxford procrastination conference (seriously! ;), and on a trip to Brussels and the European Parliament. Finally, I presented some early research results at the Connected Life 2014 conference, where I won a best presentation award.

Concluding the long year, I’ve just had a great summer. With a LAN-party at my undergraduate fraternity, 10 days in a real German castle with Mensa-Young, some time at home, and then a week of camping on the Dutch isle of Vlieland. I’m looking forward to the coming year, in which – among other things – I’ll be organizing the Mensa-Young New Year camp. However, most of all I’m looking forward to meeting y’all in Oxford again: As foremostly it was a year of true friendship!

With friends at college (sorry if you’re not in this picture; had to pick one & one that looked presentable ;)

Another exciting year at the OII

2013-08-28T00:00:00Z

A swim with friends in the river at Port Meadow

Last year at almost any time there was something more interesting to do in Oxford than updating this blog. Such as friends to meet, papers to read, famous speakers to hear at the Oxford Union, or a sunny swim in the river at Port Meadow.

With most of the city still in summer-recess, I now found the time. And as you may (or may not) have noticed, this blog is new, and has a more personal slant than the now depreciated LogiLogi blog from which previous posts were migrated. The design (& the tag-line) is probably going to change a bit still, but the basics are in place (using the Middleman static blog engine).

As for new developments: First of all my research topic changed slightly from looking at the impact of leadership and other factors on the early success of online political (discussion) communities, to the more focussed question of the extent to which the Internet may have catalysed the Arab Spring, Occupy Wallstreet and other recent protests.

More specifically I plan to model several social mechanisms that are offered by (social) media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (for example indicating ’I’m going’, for a protest-event), and then look at which of these could have been responsible for increased activism and turnout. The draft of my (so named here) Transfer-proposal, in which I set out my plans in detail, is still being reviewed by my supervisors. I will post it here once it is finished.

Speaking of supervisors, dr. Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon my supervisor (also for my MSc), moved to the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania three months ago. I will dearly miss her, as she was really great to work with. My new supervisors are political scientist Victoria Nash and sociologist (& social movements expert) Michael Biggs.

Besides this, it was a busy year in other ways as well; I presented at two conferences on how time affects on-line communities, I was teaching assistant at Statistics I, and Advanced Quantitative Analysis, and student representative on the Graduate Studies Committee. I also was (& am) IT & New Media Officer (and on Library Committee) at the Oxford Union (reviving the frontpage by adding social media streams of events on Facebook, Youtube recordings, and Tweets by the president), and I did a fair amount of debating and debating judging, both at the Union and at OxIDS. Finally I co-organized MyCamp this summer.

I am already looking forward to meeting everyone again (you know who you are :-). For with every returnee the dreaming city again awakens from its summer slumber.

In the coming year I hope to continue making good progress with my research. Also, I will be IT Student Assistant in St Cross, my college, and I will be co-convenor for the Nuffield Social Network Analysis Seminar.

Back to the City of Dreaming Spires for a DPhil

2012-04-18T00:00:00Z

This September I will be going back to Oxford to do a DPhil. I will study the appearance of critical mass in budding on-line political communities.

Online communities can greatly impact society, as the recent events in the Middle East, and the rise of global online social movements such as Occupy Wallstreet, suggest. But in order to thrive, and become a community at all, online communities have to attain a critical mass of initial users. The central problem of which is that until a certain number of participants are present, joining the community is not going to affect outcomes, or be socially rewarding to newcomers.

Also, more in general, the exact factors that determine growth in the early stages of online communities, are still ill understood. Even internet giant Google has failed to attain critical mass for some of its platforms, such as Google Wave.

For my DPhil I will contrast budding political communities that turn out to become successful (grow or continue to exist) with those that fail. More specifically, it will be examined whether the founders and early participants of successful online political communities, differ, either individually or in their position in social networks, or whether it are the early communities as a whole that differ, for example in community-level dynamics.

Contrary to the traditional belief in the impact of leaders, the answer to this question is not a given, as studies of `leaderless’ online movements, and smart-mobs, suggest. Also, several theories suggest the possibility that founders of successful communities could be socially indistinguishable from those of communities that fail. See my full proposal for more information.

I have a scholarship from the Economic and Social Research Council, and will be doing my DPhil at the Oxford Internet Institute, where I also did my masters. The OII is an interdisciplinary research-centre of the the University of Oxford, focusing on Social Science research applied to the Internet. My supervisor will be Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon, who is doing fascinating research on the growth of online political communities, and other aspects of online political interactions.

I will be leaving a great job at a great startup for this, but then one sometimes has to make difficult decisions in order to pursue a dream: that of doing (great and relevant) research, and becoming an academic.

Panorama of Oxford, and the entrance to 1 St Giles, where the Oxford Internet Institute is based

Academia.edu and San Francisco

2012-04-17T00:00:00Z

While still working on my MSc thesis, I went to San Francisco this summer. I first attended the Digital Humanities 2011 conference at Stanford University. It was great to see many known faces there again, and the talks and posters were ‘not bad’ either. Especially impressive was the keynote on Culturomics, the quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books.

Then I started work at Academia.edu, a well-funded startup which now has over a million users. Academia.edu is a social network for scholars, which – besides the usual social network-features – organizes people by their department and research-interests, and enables scholars to present their publications in a beautiful way. Not only does it allow direct subscription to the news-feed of individual researchers (as in a personalized journal), but it also makes uploaded papers more widely available, as user-pages are indexed by Google, and thus easy to find by researchers and other interested parties.

Academia.edu is (also see next post) a great place to work. The team consists of great engineers, and decisions are generally made in a non-hierarchical way that allows the best ideas to come to the fore. A lot of interesting new technologies are being used as well, such as Redis, MongoDB, Memcached, Varnish, and Solr (besides Ruby on Rails). In that sense it is a real startup. And since I arrived we have started doing automated testing, and been improving the quality of the code. In addition to all this, our office also provides a very nice work-environment, as it is centrally located (Kearny and Bush), with a lot of light, and plants (for whoever wants them on their desk).

My work-space at Academia.edu

Our elephant-ear – name says it all – plant in the office at Academia.edu

And finally, San Francisco is not only part of the Sillicon Valley area; the heartland of the internet, but also is a great place to live. Though there is a bit more fog than I initially expected. My room is near Golden Gate Park, which is nice for taking long walks, and being surrounded by nature. Besides, there are a lot of cool coding-related events in the city (almost daily), many theaters, museums, and there are even some nice beaches nearby (Ocean Beach is my favorite, though the sea there is very cold). I haven’t gone for trips outside the city that much, but I did visit Lake Tahoe twice, which is a real gem, both in summer, and in winter.

Tahoe in the middle of summer, 2011

Tahoe during our company ski trip