Computer Risks

This page summarizes ongoing research on Computer Risks, and particularly Cyber-Risks as well as investigation on Open Source Success (Failure).

Opportunities and Dangers of Digital Communications and their mutual Intrication

Brett M. Frischmann, Avoiding a Cliff Dive, Science (July 2008)
(Comments on The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It by Jonathan L. Zittrain, Yale University Press)

Cyber-Risks

Identity Thefts as Proxy of Cyber-Risks: An Empirical Study

T. Maillart and D. Sornette, Heavy-tailed distribution of cyber-risks, submitted to Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA (2008)
(http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.2256)

Success and Failure Mechanisms in Open Source Projects

Evolution of the Open Source Ecosystem

T. Maillart, D. Sornette, S. Spaeth and G. Von Krogh, Empirical Tests of Zipf's law Mechanism In Open Source Linux Distribution, accepted in Physical Review Letters (2008)
(http://arXiv.org/abs/0807.0014)

Factors of Success and Failure in Open Source Projects 

Open Position for Master Project:

Factors of Success and Failure in Open Source Projects

Goal: Uncover factors of success in Open Source Projects by applying the endo/exo framework

This work is at the frontier of theory and research in economics and management, and emergence of cooperation in complex systems. This project is a unique opportunity to understand quantitatively the emergence of success in new ventures. This work is integrated in a joint research program jointly supervised by Profs. Sornette and von Krogh.

One way of measuring the “performance” of any Package in an Open Source Linux Distribution can be measured by the number of other packages, which call it in its routines. It is now established that average connectivity of a given package is increasing following a multiplicative random stochastic process called "proportional growth". This basically means that the more a package is connected the more likely it will gain new connections.

Our hypothesis is that some external factors (market, utility) as well as internal factors (organization, distribution of work) contribute to the success (or failure) of an Open Source project.