Sean Gourley

San Francisco, California, United States Contact Info
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Experience & Education

  • Serko Ltd.

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Publications

  • Common ecology quantifies human insurgency

    Nature

    Many collective human activities, including violence, have been shown to exhibit universal patterns. The size distributions of casualties both in whole wars from 1816 to 1980 and terrorist attacks have separately been shown to follow approximate power-law distributions. However, the possibility of universal patterns ranging across wars in the size distribution or timing of within-conflict events has barely been explored. Here we show that the sizes and timing of violent events within different…

    Many collective human activities, including violence, have been shown to exhibit universal patterns. The size distributions of casualties both in whole wars from 1816 to 1980 and terrorist attacks have separately been shown to follow approximate power-law distributions. However, the possibility of universal patterns ranging across wars in the size distribution or timing of within-conflict events has barely been explored. Here we show that the sizes and timing of violent events within different insurgent conflicts exhibit remarkable similarities. We propose a unified model of human insurgency that reproduces these commonalities, and explains conflict-specific variations quantitatively in terms of underlying rules of engagement. Our model treats each insurgent population as an ecology of dynamically evolving, self-organized groups following common decision-making processes. Our model is consistent with several recent hypotheses about modern insurgency is robust to many generalizations, and establishes a quantitative connection between human insurgency, global terrorism and ecology. Its similarity to financial market models provides a surprising link between violent and non-violent forms of human behaviour.

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  • Common ecology quantifies human insurgency

    Nature

    See publication

Projects

Honors & Awards

  • World Technolgy Award - Information Technology (Software)

    World Technology Network

    The World Technology Awards are presented annually by the World Technology Network (The WTN) at its World Technology Summit to individuals and corporations achieving significant, lasting progress in categories pertaining to science, technology, the arts, and design.

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