Inteligência coletiva: um olhar sobre a produção de Pierre Lévy

Collective intelligence is an interdisciplinary subject and it has been explored for many different knowledge areas. As a proposal totally tied to the concept of information and information technologies and communication, it is considered as relevant the discussion about the topic within the scope of Information Science. Therefore, a descriptive and exploratory study was carried out from Pierre Levy's work, identifying the precepts of collective intelligence and its ambiences and implications. The research is documental, focusing on determining the state of the art of the production about collective intelligence, verifying what was produced by Pierre Lévy and by other authors about the subject, in order to point out what possible interventions of Information Science on studies about collective intelligence. The research showed that that in the field of Information Science there is little research on the theoretical level about collective intelligence. Nevertheless, discussions about the representation and organization of collective intelligence in digital environments have been recurrent in the present, thus opening new fields of approach between Information Science and conceptual research and practice in collective intelligence.

A moment symbolic representation of Lévy processes with applications

By using a symbolic method, known in the literature as the classical umbral calculus, a symbolic representation of Lévy processes is given and a new family of time-space harmonic polynomials with respect to such processes, which includes and generalizes the exponential complete Bell polynomials, is introduced. The usefulness of time-space harmonic polynomials with respect to Lévy processes is that it is a martingale the stochastic process obtained by replacing the indeterminate x of the polynomials with a Lévy process, whereas the Lévy process does not necessarily have this property. Therefore to find such polynomials could be particularly meaningful for applications. This new family includes Hermite polynomials, time-space harmonic with respect to Brownian motion, Poisson-Charlier polynomials with respect to Poisson processes, Laguerre and actuarial polynomials with respect to Gamma processes , Meixner polynomials of the first kind with respect to Pascal processes, Euler, Bernoulli, Krawtchuk, and pseudo-Narumi polynomials with respect to suitable random walks. The role played by cumulants is stressed and brought to the light, either in the symbolic representation of Lévy processes and their infinite divisibility property, either in the generalization, via umbral Kailath-Segall formula, of the well-known formulae giving elementary symmetric polynomials in terms of power sum symmetric polynomials. The expression of the family of time-space harmonic polynomials here introduced has some connections with the so-called moment representation of various families of multivariate polynomials. Such moment representation has been studied here for the first time in connection with the time-space harmonic property with respect to suitable symbolic multivariate Lévy processes. In particular, multivariate Hermite polynomials and their properties have been studied in connection with a symbolic version of the multivariate Brownian motion, while multivariate Bernoulli and Euler polynomials are represented as powers of multivariate polynomials which are time-space harmonic with respect to suitable multivariate Lévy processes.

Dupire's formula for exponential Lévy models

Questa tesi è incentrata sull'analisi della formula di Dupire, che permette di ottenere un'espressione della volatilità locale, nei modelli di Lévy esponenziali. Vengono studiati i modelli di mercato Merton, Kou e Variance Gamma dimostrando che quando si è off the money la volatilità locale tende ad infinito per il tempo di maturità delle opzioni che tende a zero. In particolare viene proposta una procedura di regolarizzazione tale per cui il processo di volatilità locale di Dupire ricrea i corretti prezzi delle opzioni anche quando si ha la presenza di salti. Infine tale risultato viene provato numericamente risolvendo il problema di Cauchy per i prezzi delle opzioni.

Il Teorema di Inversione di Lévy

In questa tesi si dimostra il teorema di inversione di Lévy, risultato che permette di ricostruire, a partire dalla funzione caratteristica di una variabile aleatoria assolutamente continua, la sua densità. Come conseguenza si dimostra che la funzione caratteristica di una variabile aleatoria ne caratterizza univocamente la distribuzione. Viene inoltre presentata una applicazione della formula di inversione per la valutazione di opzioni in finanza con esempi numerici basati sul modello Merton.

On the recurrence of random walks in Lévy random environments

This thesis investigates one-dimensional random walks in random environment whose transition probabilities might have an infinite variance. The ergodicity of the dynamical system ''from the point of view of the particle'' is proved under the assumptions of transitivity and existence of an absolutely continuous steady state on the space of the environments. We show that, if the average of the local drift over the environments is summable and null, then the RWRE is recurrent. We provide an example satisfying all the hypotheses.