Summer Research 2017 - Norm Emergence in Merging Networks 10 Sep 2019
In 2017 summer, I participated in the undergraduate summer research programme held by department.
I selected the topic posted by professor Leung Ho-Fung, and conducted research under his supervision. It was the first time I experienced academic research, and I was intrigued by the academic world presented in front of me.
Topic Desicion
As one of professor Leung’s focus is on the multi-agent system, I briefly searched for some related concepts on the Internet before I met professor Leung, only finding them difficult to understand. With a partial understanding, I went to the meeting. However, as professor Leung explained to me, those profound concepts suddenly become simple and clear. After several discussions, professor Leung recommended me to read the paper published by Dr Jiamou Liu et al., From the Periphery to the Core: Information Brokerage in an Evolving Network, and try to find some interesting idea. After reading the paper, a thought came into: how will the agents behave if multiple societies with different consensus integrate into one? There after, this tiny thought became my research topic in the summer research.
Works
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Combined the algorithms of merging networks presented in Dr Liu’s work and the tools of convention emergence, in order to explore how the agents behave when two networks with local conventions are merging into a whole one
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Reproduced the algorithms of merging networks, as well as the establishment of local conventions in scale-free networks
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Worked with a team of 5 to implement and analyze the combined mechanism
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Completed a research report and a poster presentation of the works in summer 2017 at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Retrospection
For me, this was not a satisfying research though. I did enjoy the process of learning new things and exploring new fields, but I did not devote enough time to the actual coding and experiment part. The lack of devotion directly leads to the situation that I did not have a good and clean end of this research: I could not organize the report and poster presentation logically and rigorously, as I did not have a rigorous experiment design and process, or a well-presented result to answer my question in the very first place. This was one lesson for me, that I should not only focus on the fun part of learning and exploring, but also the down to the earth part of coding, refining, and testing.