Charles Darwin wrote that he wished he had worked harder at mathematics, so as to possess the "extra sense" that he felt mathematicians can bring to understanding the world. The new 45 minute documentary, “Darwin's Extra Sense”, explores how twenty-first century mathematics is bringing an extra sense to the study ...

Information theory provides a powerful set of tools for discovering relationships among variables with minimal assumptions. Social media platforms provide a rich source of information than can include temporal, spatial, textual, and network information. What are the interesting information theoretic measures for social media and how can we estimate these ...

A Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is a Markov process observed through a noisy channel. HMMs are used extensively for modeling sequential data and have various applications in natural language processing, bioinformatics, mathematical economics, and so on. One of the main problems underlying HMMs is inferring the hidden state sequence based ...

Typological approaches to understanding cultural evolution have been utilized, and strongly criticized, for more than a century (Sanderson 2007). Some of my own work has been a part of that long critique. But recent statistical analyses of cultural evolution suggest that there are patterns of punctuated equilibrium which may correlate ...

Over the last 20 years, we have enjoyed a wealth of new archaeological data that tests and revises our theories of the evolution of social complexity. Complexity here is defined as an increase in the number of non-kin that cooperate in the production and exchange of resources resulting in, among ...