Society faces a fundamental global problem of understanding which individuals are currently developing strong support for some extremist entity such as ISIS (Islamic State) - even if they never end up doing anything in the real world. The importance of online connectivity in developing intent...

How self-organized networks develop, mature and degenerate is a key question for sociotechnical, cyberphysical and biological systems with potential applications from tackling violent extremism through to neurological diseases. So far, it has proved impossible to measure the continuous-time...

I present a unified discussion of several recently published results concerning the escalation, timing and severity of violent events in human conflicts and global terrorism, and set them in the wider context of real-world and cyber-based collective violence and illicit activity. I point out how...

Rare but potentially catastrophic real-world phenomena such as stock market crashes, are often referred to as rare or extreme ‘events' on the assumption that they have a well-defined change (e.g. price-change) in some macroscopically measurable quantity (e.g. stock price) occurring at a...

Society's drive toward ever faster socio-technical systems, means that there is an urgent need to understand the threat from ‘black swan' extreme events that might emerge. On 6 May 2010, it took just five minutes for a spontaneous mix of human and machine interactions in the global trading...