Month: November 2022

It is well known that contagious diseases follow exponential growth. However, what if we can conclude a disease is contagious without looking back? In this blog, we try to explore how we can simplify this identification problem with a lot fewer data points using power law. Introduction In this blog, we will use COVID-19 as […]

Introduction Have you ever wondered why those dates you matched with on Tinder never turned into anything much after the first date? Game theory can be used in analyzing dating. Dating apps like Tinder have been increasingly more popular in more and more digitally connected age. We are seeing more people using than ever before […]

Introduction As we have already learned in class, nodes in real network are usually not randomly connected, which is why we have focused on tweaking randomly generated graphs to better model the real world. The underlying reason for this phenomena is that nodes on real networks such as social networks are not random nodes, rather […]

As we’ve probably all heard in recent news, Facebook/Meta has again been in the spotlight with what seems like another failure on the companies hands. Earlier this month, Meta has fired over 11k employees as Mark Zukerburg “takes responsibility” for the companies recent shortcomings as stock prices continue to fall and the Metaverse continues to […]

In the digital age, access to information has exploded and has sparked the Information Era. Back when the Internet was emerging, it was intuitive that giving everyone access to such wealth of information should probably even out the playing field. In other words, provide equality of opportunity because everyone has access to the same information […]

Graph theory is widely used in the majority of all social networks we use. Whether it be Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, users are always suggested new friends/connections based on their current group of friends/connections. A concept within graph theory that this uses is strong triadic closure, so the idea that a friend of a friend is […]

PageRank is famously known as the Google Search Algorithm, but it can also be used in a variety of other applications from traffic flow to recommendation systems. One of the parculiar use cases of PageRank was explored in a paper published in Journal of Computational Chemistry. This paper describes the use of PageRank to determine […]

When does a blockchain fork? In my last blogpost, I analyzed an article pertaining to Bitcoin’s participant’s trust in a BTC trading platform and the risk implications on market operations if important network nodes are amiss. In this analysis, I would like to focus on the persons behind the software who make the entirety of […]

Introduction In class, we learned about an important algorithm used for ranking the pages and links that show up first when users search for information in Google’s search engine. This blog will explore the algorithm that google uses to rank articles that appear first in Google Scholar, which is a free web search engine that […]

1. Introduction Over the last 2-3 decades, object oriented programming (OOP) has taken over the software development world as one of the go-to development paradigms. This is largely due to its ability to partition independent parts of the software and build layers of abstractions allowing developers to focus on smaller parts of a problem individually. […]

Introduction One of the most classic ways to make use of game theory is for maximizing economic profits as a business enterprise. Being a conscientious citizen, we might not always attempt to maximize profit, nevertheless, it cannot be denied that many if not all companies in the world just care about obtaining the maximum possible […]

Introduction Even with years of experience detecting and correcting fraudulent transactions, card fraud remains an incredibly prevalent issue. In 2019, global losses due to card fraud were estimated to be around $28.65 billion, and the prevalence of online banking means attacks are quick to execute and easy to scale. Extensive fraud detection systems are already […]

In our lives, we make a series of choices on who to help, who to listen to and how to decide our actions when around others and what we will do always changes based on who is on the other end. Someone who is more popular and thus have more impact on others or not, […]

Introduction Although baseball is a team sport, it is unique in that the game revolves around individual one on ones of the pitcher and batter of two separate teams. This aspect of the game is the perfect application for game theory, as both the batter and pitcher know everything about each other, such as the […]

Introduction How many friends do you have that you trust completely? Have you noticed that a phenomenon that people are not willing to trust others nowadays? I got the feeling that distrust among people becomes a rising trend. To figure out why there exists such a phenomenon and tendency, I searched online and found an […]

Understanding Epidemiology through World of Warcraft -Kyle Carlos   Introduction World of Warcraft (WOW)is a legendary MMOORPG (massive multiplayer online role playing game) that at it’s peaked commanded roughly 10 million active players. In this game people would roam the lands of Azeroth, Exploring dungeons, socializing with peers, long distance trading and do raids(massive team). […]

Extended analysis of YouTube Music recommendation algorithm In my previous post, I discussed how the YouTube Music recommendation algorithm worked. As we have learned more properties about social networks, I will extend my analysis of the graph. As a reminder, in my previous post I analyzed the recommendation algorithm of YouTube Music by going through […]

Introduction The power law is a phenomenon that appears in surprisingly many different contexts: from usage of unique words in a novel, and the amount of air traffic in different airports, to the number of times research projects are cited. In 2018, Deferico Etro and Elena Stepanova from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice have found […]

Introduction Quantitative risk analysis is a fundamental concept in computer security and is also one of the first topics introduced in CSCD27 (Computer and Network Security). To summarize, it involves calculating risk exposure for potential threats to a system, by a simple formula: (probability * impact). This allows the risk “manager” to prioritize certain threats […]

In class, we discussed several uses for game theory, particularly with respect to congestion games — one of which was a basic example involving minimizing travel times given a certain set of paths we may take. In the real world, this might involve many more parameters, particularly where we can no longer generalize a route, […]

Introduction In class, we discussed the web as a network and we saw that a network is not necessarily limited to just the web and social media such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, etc. It happens to be that Mark Zuckerberg’s company Meta has been working on the metaverse for quite some time and recently, it […]

Introduction In the lecture last week when the topic of game theory and its application in a problem such as the prisoners’ dilemma was introduced it brought up a blast from the past of my CSCB07 midterm where we had a “CSCB07 Dilemma”. Our instructor created a bonus where there were 3 options of 7, […]

Introduction Newton’s laws of gravity are one of the most critical findings in the history of mankind. They are the foundation for thousands of scientific research papers and theories in classical physics. In fact, they’re so elemental, that children are taught about them in high school. However, a recently published research paper from a group […]

The game of Chess has been studied meticulously for years (and possibly solved with computers), yet this never takes away from the beauty of the game when your opponent plays such an absurd move it makes you double-take.  Playing the game is as much mental warfare as it is pieces on the board tearing each […]

Introduction Tragedy of the Commons is a situation where a group of individuals have open access to a common resource, acting independently towards their own interest and eventually causing the depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated actions. This phenomenon frequently occurs in the realm of sustainability. For example, fishers in an area might catch […]

Introduction To go out or not to go out, that is the question. For 2 years, we had lockdowns, cancellations, vaccinations and boosters, all for preventing the spread and severity COVID-19. However, as humans do, we will all need to go out eventually, so people during this time had to decide whether the risk of […]

Introduction In the past few years, some people have seen a very significant growth in their bank accounts within a relatively short period of time through starting a new business during the pandemic, having good timing in the cryptocurrency market, or landing a high-paying job. With many of these people being new to having more […]

Introduction Currently the Doug Ford Government is in an active dispute with the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) regarding additional hourly pay as well as other forms of additional pay and support. CUPE is pushing for this because the hourly wages of the workers in the union have not changed in years and comparative […]

Introduction I am sure most of us have heard of the phrase “survival of the fittest” which was made popular by the famous evolutionist Charles Darwin. The context in which this phrase was used, was about how in nature, animals who were the best adapted to their environment or the most “fit” would be the […]