Complexes

Self-organization can be broadly defined as the ability of a system to display ordered spatiotemporal patterns solely as the result of the interactions among the system components. Processes of this kind characterize both living and artificial systems, making self-organization a concept that is at the basis of several disciplines, from physics to biology and engineering. Placed at the frontiers between disciplines, artificial life (ALife) has heavily borrowed concepts and tools from the study of self-organization, providing mechanistic interpretations of lifelike phenomena as well as useful constructivist approaches to artificial system design. Despite its broad usage within ALife, the concept of self-organization has been often excessively stretched or misinterpreted, calling for a clarification that could help with tracing the borders between what can and cannot be considered self-organization. In this review, we discuss the fundamental aspects of self-organization and list the main ...

A month late, but I share a draft where we propose a simple measure of antifragility and apply it to random and biological Boolean networks. Spoiler: biological networks are antifragile. Abstract: Antifragility is a property that enhances the capability of a system in response to external perturbations. Although the concept has been applied in many areas, a practical measure of antifragility has not been developed yet. Here we propose a simply calculable measure of antifragility, based on the change of "satisfaction" before and after adding perturbations, and apply it to random Boolean networks (RBNs). Using the measure, we found that ordered RBNs are the most antifragile. Also, we demonstrate that seven biological systems are antifragile. Our measure and results can be used in various applications of Boolean networks (BNs) including creating antifragile engineering systems, identifying the genetic mechanism of antifragile biological systems, and developing new treatment st...

Paper/ abstract submission deadline: February 14th, 2016 Notification to authors: March 25th, 2016 Camera ready due: April 24th, 2016 The Fifteenth International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (ALife XV) will be held in Cancun, Mexico on July 4th-8th, 2016. http://xva.life We cordially invite you to submit your work in either full paper (8 pages) or extended abstract (2 pages) format. Accepted papers and abstracts will be published by MIT Press as  open-access electronic proceedings .  Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following aspects of Artificial Life: – Computational humanities/anthropology/archeology – Evolution of language, computational linguistics – Bio-inspired, cognitive and evolutionary robotics – Self-replication, self-repair and morphogenesis – Artificial chemistry, origins of life – Cellular automata and discrete dynamical systems – Perception, cognition and behavior – Embodied, intera...

For millennia people have wondered what makes the living different from the non-living. Beginning in the mid-1980s, artificial life has studied living systems using a synthetic approach: build life in order to understand it better, be it by means of software, hardware, or wetware. This review provides a summary of the advances that led to the development of artificial life, its current research topics, and open problems and opportunities. We classify artificial life research into 14 themes: origins of life, autonomy, self-organization, adaptation (including evolution, development, and learning), ecology, artificial societies, behavior, computational biology, artificial chemistries, information, living technology, art, and philosophy. Being interdisciplinary, artificial life seems to be losing its boundaries and merging with other fields. Aguilar W, Santamaría-Bonfil G, Froese T and Gershenson C (2014) The past, present, and future of artificial life. Front. Robot. AI 1:8. http://dx....

Self-organisation occurs in natural phenomena when a spontaneous increase inorder is produced by the interactions of elements of a complex system. Thermodynamically,this increase must be offset by production of entropy which, broadly speaking, can beunderstood as a decrease in order. Ideally, self-organisation can be used to guide the systemtowards a desired regime or state, while “exporting” the entropy to the system’s exterior. Thus, Guided Self-Organisation (GSO) attempts to harness the order-inducing potentialof self-organisation for specific purposes. Not surprisingly, general methods developed tostudy entropy can also be applied to guided self-organisation. This special issue covers a broad diversity of GSO approaches which can be classified in three categories: informationtheory, intelligent agents, and collective behavior. The proposals make another step towardsa unifying theory of GSO which promises to impact numerous research fields. Entropy Methods in Guided Self-Organisat...

Ashby's law of requisite variety states that a controller must have at least as much variety (complexity) as the controlled. Maturana and Varela proposed autopoiesis (self-production) to define living systems. Living systems also require to fulfill the law of requisite variety. A measure of autopoiesis has been proposed as the ratio between the complexity of a system and the complexity of its environment. Self-organization can be used as a concept to guide the design of systems towards higher values of autopoiesis, with the potential of making technology more "living", i.e. adaptive and robust. Requisite Variety, Autopoiesis, and Self-organization Carlos Gershenson Invited keynote at WOSC 2014 http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.7475

//Please forward to whom may be interested.

 The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) has an open call for postdoctoral fellowships to start in March, 2015. 

Candidates should have obtained a PhD degree within the last three years and be under 36 years, both to the date of the beginning of the fellowship.

 The area of interests of candidates should fall within complex systems, artificial life, information, evolution, cognition, robotics, and/or philosophy.

 Interested candidates should send CV and a tentative project (1 paragraph) to cgg-at-unam.mx by Monday, June 30th (if starting in September 2014, otherwise in the coming months). Full application package should be ready by Friday, July 4th at noon, Mexico City time.
 Projects can be inspired from:  http://turing.iimas.unam.mx/~cgg/projects.html

  ,  http://froese.wordpress.com/research/  and/or  http://jmsiqueiros.org Postdoctoral fellowships are between one and two years (after...

Upshot : The limitations of materialism for studying cognition have motivated alternative epistemologies based on information and computation. I argue that these alternatives are also inherently limited and that these limits can only be overcome by considering materialism, info-computationalism, and cognition at the same time. Open peer commentary on the article “ Info-computational Constructivism and Cognition ” by Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic. Gershenson C. (2014) Info-computationalism or Materialism? Neither and Both. Constructivist Foundations 9(2) : 241–242. Available at  http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/9/2/241.gershenson

ALIFE 14: THE FOURTEENTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE SYNTHESIS AND SIMULATION OF LIVING SYSTEMS July 31st - August 2nd, 2014 Javits Center, Manhattan, New York, NY, USA http://alife14.org Sponsored by the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL) January 15, 2014 -- Workshop/tutorial proposal deadline February 1, 2014 -- Science visualization competition deadline March 31, 2014 -- Paper/abstract submission deadline ********************************************************************** We cordially invite you to submit papers to ALIFE 14: The Fourteenth International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems. Since its inception in 1987, ALIFE has been the leading biyearly international conference in the field of Artificial Life -- the highly interdisciplinary research area on artificially constructed living systems, including mathematical, computational, robotic, and biochemical ones. The understanding and application of such generalized forms of life, or ...

This article presents an overview of current and potential applications of living technology to some urban problems. Living technology can be described as technology that exhibits the core features of living systems. These features can be useful to solve dynamic problems. In particular, urban problems concerning mobility, logistics, telecommunications, governance, safety, sustainability, and society and culture are presented, and solutions involving living technology are reviewed. A methodology for developing living technology is mentioned, and supraoptimal public transportation systems are used as a case study to illustrate the benefits of urban living technology. Finally, the usefulness of describing cities as living systems is discussed. Gershenson, C. (2013). Living in living cities. Artificial Life , 19  (3 & 4): 401–420. http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/ARTL_a_00112   Free Access Related to this  TED@SãoPaulo talk . Check the rest of the...

//Please forward to whom may be interested. The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) has an open call for postdoctoral fellowships to start in March, 2014 (with a close deadline!). Candidates should have obtained a PhD degree within the last three years and be under 36 years, both to the date of the beginning of the fellowship. The area of interests of candidates should fall within complex systems, artificial life, information, evolution, cognition, robotics, and/or philosophy. Interested candidates should send CV and a tentative project (1 paragraph) to cgg-at-unam.mx by Friday, August 2nd.   Full application package should be ready by Monday, August 5 at noon, Mexico City time. Projects can be inspired from:  http://turing.iimas.unam.mx/~cgg/projects.html Postdoctoral fellowships are between one and two years (after renewal). Spanish is not a requisite. Accepted candidates would be working at the Self-organizing Systems Lab ( http://turing.iimas.unam....

The goal of Guided Self-Organization (GSO) is to leverage the strengths of self-organization while still being able to direct the outcome of the self-organizing process. GSO typically has the following features: (i) an increase in organization (structure and/or functionality) over some time; (ii) the local interactions are not explicitly guided by any external agent; (iii) task-independent objectives are combined with task-dependent constraints. A number of attempts have been made to formalize aspects of GSO within information theory, thermodynamics and dynamical systems. However, the lack of a broadly applicable mathematical framework across multiple scales and contexts leaves GSO methodology incomplete. Devising such a framework and identifying common principles of guidance are the main themes of the GSO workshops. Of particular interest are well-founded, but general methods for characterizing GSO systems in a principled way, with the view of ultimately allowing them to be guided...

The extended mind hypothesis has stimulated much interest in cognitive science. However, its core claim, i.e. that the process of cognition can extend beyond the brain via the body and into the environment, has been heavily criticized. A prominent critique of this claim holds that when some part of the world is coupled to a cognitive system this does not necessarily entail that the part is also constitutive of that cognitive system. This critique is known as the "coupling-constitution fallacy". In this paper we respond to this reductionist challenge by using an evolutionary robotics approach to create a minimal model of two acoustically coupled agents. We demonstrate how the interaction process as a whole has properties that cannot be reduced to the contributions of the isolated agents. We also show that the neural dynamics of the coupled agents has formal properties that are inherently impossible for those neural networks in isolation. By keeping the complexity of the model ...

We extend the concept that life is an informational phenomenon, at every level of organisation, from molecules to the global ecological system. According to this thesis: (a) living is information processing, in which memory is maintained by both molecular states and ecological states as well as the more obvious nucleic acid coding; (b) this information processing has one overall function - to perpetuate itself; and (c) the processing method is filtration (cognition) of, and synthesis of, information at lower levels to appear at higher levels in complex systems (emergence). We show how information patterns, are united by the creation of mutual context, generating persistent consequences, to result in `functional information'. This constructive process forms arbitrarily large complexes of information, the combined effects of which include the functions of life. Molecules and simple organisms have already been measured in terms of functional information content; we show how quantifica...

Earlier this month I gave a seminar back at the VUB, one of my alma maters. Here is a video recording, more details here  or below. Application of living technology to urban problems   Carlos Gershenson  (Universidad Nacional  Autónoma de México)  Abstract: I will present an overview of current and potential applications of living technology to urban problems. Living technology can be described as technology that exhibits the core features of living systems. These features can be useful to solve dynamic problems. In particular, urban problems concerning mobility, logistics, telecommunications, governance, safety, sustainability, and society and culture are presented, while solutions involving living technology are reviewed. A methodology for developing living technology is mentioned, while supraoptimal public transportation systems are used as a case study to illustrate the benefits of urban living technology. Finally, the usefulness of de...

Last June I had the privilege to participate in a wonderful evening in São Paulo where local TEDx organizers from all over Brazil gathered to attend TED's worldwide talent search . There were extremely interesting and moving 6 minute talks from a very broad range of themes and topics. I gave a talk on our work on Living Cities and their potential for solving urban problems. There were almost 300 talks in 14 cities worldwide. 20 of those will be selected to present in TED2013. TED@SãoPaulo was the only event held in Latin America, and I am the only Mexican competing for a place in TED2013. Please watch, rate, comment, and share my talk before August 31st, to help the organizers decide: http://talentsearch.ted.com/video/Carlos-Gershenson-Bringing-urba;TEDSao-Paulo You can find related work at http://arxiv.or­g/abs/1111.3659 http://dx.doi.­org/10.1371/jour­nal.pone.0021469 http://dx.plos.­org/10.1371/jour­nal.pone.0007292

This paper presents and overview of current and potential applications of living technology to urban problems. Living technology can be described as technology that exhibits the core features of living systems. These features can be useful to solve dynamic problems. In particular, urban problems concerning mobility, logistics, telecommunications, governance, safety, sustainability, and society and culture are presented, while solutions involving living technology are reviewed. Finally, the usefulness of describing cities as living systems is discussed. Gershenson, C. (2011). Living in Living Cities. C3 Report 2011.09.  http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.3659

//Please forward to whom may be interested. The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) has an open call for postdoctoral fellowships. Candidates should have obtained a PhD degree within the last three years and be under 36 years, both to the date of the beginning of the fellowship. In previous years, there has been a 50% acceptance rate. Candidates are evaluated mainly by their number of papers published in ISI-indexed journals. The area of interests of candidates should fall within complex systems, artificial life, information, evolution, cognition, robotics, and/or philosophy. Interested candidates should send CV and a tentative project (1 paragraph) to cgg-at-unam.mx Projects can be inspired from: http://turing.iimas.unam.mx/~cgg/projects.html Postdoctoral fellowships are between one and three years (renewing each year). Spanish is not a requisite. Accepted candidates would be working at the Computer Science Department of the IIMAS ( http://turing.iimas.unam.mx...

Marriott, Chris & Carlos Gershenson. Polyethism in a colony of artificial ants . C3 Report 2011.03. Abstract : We explore self-organizing strategies for role assignment in a foraging task carried out by a colony of artificial agents. Our strategies are inspired by various mechanisms of division of labor (polyethism) observed in eusocial insects like ants, termites, or bees. Specifically we instantiate models of caste polyethism and age or temporal polyethism to evaluate the benefits to foraging in a dynamic environment. Our experiment is directly related to the exploration/exploitation trade of in machine learning. Full text :  http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.3152

CALL FOR PAPERS: ECAL 2011   << Back to the origins of Alife >> ECAL 2011, European Conference on Artificial Life, an international conference on the simulation and synthesis of living systems 8-12 August 2011, Paris, France www.ecal11.org                         ===================== Artificial Life is an interdisciplinary undertaking that investigates the fundamental properties of living systems through the simulation and synthesis of biological entities and processes. It also attempts to design and build artificial systems that display properties of organisms, or societies of organisms, out of abiotic or virtual parts. ECAL, the European Conference on Artificial Life, is a biennial event that alternates with the US-based Alife conference series. --------------------- Welcome to ECAL 2011! Back then, in the early 1990's, the first two ECAL conferences in Paris and Brussels were mainly center...