2022 ANNUAL REPORT

happy to rise to the challenge. Through the scienceartwork exhibitions, BINA’s museum strives to illustrate complicated scientific issues for the public. But in this case, it was a two-way work that propelled Prof. Fridman to set sail outside of his territorial waters on an intriguing research project concerning network behavior. Prof. Fridman and his partner Dr. Elad Sniderman, a sound artist from Stony Brook University, New York, built a system—or network— made of 16 philharmonic violin players who cannot see one another and can hear only portions of their fellow musicians through a headset. The scientists had complete control over the headsets, and they played around with the outer parameters, including who heard whom and the volume of the sound. They gave the violinists only one task: to synchronize. “Trying to do what they have practiced their entire lives and do best, the musicians were visibly frustrated,” reported Prof. Fridman. Being a trained classical dancer himself, Prof. Fridman knows how crucial precision is to mastery: “We expected to see the violinist averaging, as do systems or networks in the physical and biological worlds and even galaxies in space. But in this impossible situation, unlike any other network we know of, the violinists canceled some of their connections to fulfill their task and synchronize.” The research and new mathematic model describing how the human network behaved in an impossible frustrating circumstance was published in an article in Nature Communications. “Through our advanced system we get results more accurate than ever before, up to the thousandth.” To date, there is no equivalent to Prof. Fridman’s system accuracy in social science research, and it sparked the opportunity to ask and get answers to more profound questions. What are the decision processes in a multiplayer human network when not everyone is connected and can talk to each other? For example, how do they choose a leader? Can we predict who will be the chosen leader? Can we influence the decisionmaking process (and thus influence who will be the chosen leader) by changing only the outer parameters of the network? There are considerable implications of such data and capabilities in our age of globalism, technology and social media dominance. BINA’s Ripple Effect Delving deeper, Prof. Fridman has partnered with a Colorado University group researches insect networks and interactions. “Like in our human network, the communication in insect networks is partial; imagine a beehive, for example,” he says, “and we now strive to learn the differences and similarities between human and insect networks. Is it that we humans are sophisticated and singular, or maybe the ability to cancel some connections to resolve complexity (be it synchronizing, choosing a leader and so forth) is a fundamental ability that people share with any other biological network?” Prof. Fridman is adamant that this project is a great illustration of BINA’s outstanding strategy and human resources: “It shows what it means to us scientists to have the opportunity to work, and may I add play, with colleagues from other disciplines that have a different set of skills. De facto, BINA is a whole that facilitates something beyond the sum of its parts.” 20

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