It is thought that the hairy legs of water walking arthropods are able to remain clean and dry because the flexibility of the hairs spontaneously moves drops off the hairs. We present a mathematical model of this bending-induced motion, or bendotaxis, and study how it performs for wetting and non-wetting drops. Crucially, we show that both wetting and non-wetting droplets move in the same direction (using physical arguments and numerical solutions). This suggests that a surface covered in elastic filaments (such as the hairy leg of insects) may be able to universally self-clean. To quantify the efficiency of this effect, we explore the conditions under which drops leave the structure by ‘spreading’ rather than translating and also how long it takes to do so.

A great deal of effort has gone into trying to model social influence --- including the spread of behavior, norms, and ideas --- on networks. Most models of social influence tend to assume that individuals react to changes in the states of their neighbors without any time delay, but this is often not true in social contexts, where (for various reasons) different agents can have different response times. To examine such situations, we introduce the idea of a timer into threshold models of social influence. The presence of timers on nodes delays the adoption --- i.e., change of state --- of each agent, which in turn delays the adoptions of its neighbors. With a homogeneous-distributed timer, in which all nodes exhibit the same amount of delay, adoption delays are also homogeneous, so the adoption order of nodes remains the same. However, heterogeneously-distributed timers can change the adoption order of nodes and hence the "adoption paths" through which state changes spread in a network. Using a threshold model of social contagions, we illustrate that heterogeneous timers can either accelerate or decelerate the spread of adoptions compared to an analogous situation with homogeneous timers, and we investigate the relationship of such acceleration or deceleration with respect to timer distribution and network structure. We derive an analytical approximation for the temporal evolution of the fraction of adopters by modifying a pair approximation of the Watts threshold model, and we find good agreement with numerical computations. We also examine our new timer model on networks constructed from empirical data.

Link to arxiv paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.04252

Temporal networks are increasingly being used to model the interactions of complex systems. 
Most studies require the temporal aggregation of edges (or events) into discrete time steps to perform analysis.
In this article we describe a static, behavioural representation of a temporal network, the temporal event graph (TEG).
The TEG describes the temporal network in terms of both inter-event time and two-event temporal motifs.
By considering the distributions of these quantities in unison we provide a new method to characterise the behaviour of individuals and collectives in temporal networks as well as providing a natural decomposition of the network.
We illustrate the utility of the TEG by providing examples on both synthetic and real temporal networks.

Identifying clusters or "communities" of densely connected nodes in networks is an active area of research, with relevance to many applications. Recent advances in the field have focused especially on temporal, multiplex, and other kinds of multilayer networks.

One method for detecting communities in multilayer networks is to maximise a generalised version of an objective function known as modularity. Writing down multilayer modularity requires the specification of two types of resolution parameters, and choosing appropriate values is crucial for uncovering meaningful community structure. In the simplest case, there are just two parameters, one controlling the sizes of detected communities, and the other influencing how much communities change from layer to layer. By establishing an equivalence between modularity optimisation and a multilayer maximum-likelihood approach to community detection, we are able to determine statistically optimal values for these two parameters. 

When applied to existing multilayer benchmarks, our optimized approach performs significantly better than using parameter choices guided by heuristics. We also apply the method to supermarket data, revealing changes in consumer behaviour over time.

Classical algorithms for numerical integration (quadrature/cubature) proceed by approximating the integrand with a simple function (e.g. a polynomial), and integrate the approximant exactly. In high-dimensional integration, such methods quickly become infeasible due to the curse of dimensionality.

A common alternative is the Monte Carlo method (MC), which simply takes the average of random samples, improving the estimate as more and more samples are taken. The main issue with MC is its slow "sqrt(variance/#samples)" convergence, and various techniques have been proposed to reduce the variance.

In this work we reveal a numerical analyst's interpretation of MC: it approximates the integrand with a simple(st) function, and integrates that function exactly. This observation leads naturally to MC-like methods that combines MC with function approximation theory, including polynomial approximation and sparse grids. The resulting method can be regarded as another variance reduction technique for Monte Carlo.