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SUMMARY:Toward a quantitative approach to migrants integration - Felix Nis
 sen (Cavendish Lab (TCM) / Churchill College)
DTSTART:20100611T143000Z
DTEND:20100611T150000Z
UID:TALK24570@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Daniel Cole
DESCRIPTION:"A. Barra and P. Contucci\, EPL 89\, 68001 (2010)":http://iops
 cience.iop.org/0295-5075/89/6/68001\n\nMigration phenomena and all the rel
 ated issues\, like integration of different social groups\, are intrinsica
 lly complex problems since they strongly depend on several competitive mec
 hanisms as economic factors\, cultural differences and many others. By ide
 ntifying a few essential assumptions\, and using the statistical mechanics
  of complex systems\, we propose a novel quantitative approach that provid
 es a minimal theory for those phenomena. We show that the competitive inte
 ractions in decision making between a population of N host citizens and P 
 immigrants\, a bi-partite spin-glass\, give rise to a social consciousness
  inside the host community in the sense of the associative memory of neura
 l networks. The theory leads to a natural quantitative definition of migra
 nt's "integration" inside the community. From the technical point of view 
 this minimal picture assumes\, as control parameters\, only general notion
 s like the strength of the random interactions\, the ratio between the siz
 es of the two parties and the cultural influence. Few steps forward\, towa
 rd more refined models\, which include a digression on the kind of the fel
 t experiences and some structure on the random interaction topology (as di
 lution to avoid the plain mean-field approach) and correlations of experie
 nces felt between the two parties (biasing the distribution of the couplin
 g) are discussed at the end\, where we show the robustness of our approach
 .
LOCATION:TCM Seminar Room\, Cavendish Laboratory
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