Complexes

After making several minor corrections, I have a "final" version of my thesis, which you can download here . I should defend it privately on April 20th, and if everything goes well, the public defense would be on May 2nd. Everybody's welcome! Design and Control of Self-organizing Systems PhD Dissertation presented by Carlos Gershenson Promoters: Prof. Dr. Bart D’Hooghe and Prof. Dr. Francis Heylighen Advisors: Prof. Dr. Bruce Edmonds Prof. Dr. Bernard Manderick Prof. Dr. Peter McBurney Prof. Dr. Ann Nowé Abstract Complex systems are usually difficult to design and control. There are several particular methods for coping with complexity, but there is no general approach to build complex systems. In this thesis I propose a methodology to aid engineers in the design and control of complex systems. This is based on the description of systems as self-organizing . Starting from the agent metaphor, the methodology proposes a conceptual framework and a se...

I've added 3 cartoons to Complex Humour :

Nuclear winter... (See Complexity Digest 2007.06 for an excerpt, or Science News for the full article).

ECAL2007 - 9th European Conference on Artificial Life September 10-14, 2007 Lisbon, Portugal ***************** Submission deadline: April 9, 2007 | www.ecal2007.org *********************************************** Artificial Life aims at the study of all phenomena characteristic of natural living systems, through methodologies of synthesis implemented in computational, robotic or other artificial architectures. Its wide scope ranges from the investigation of how life or life-like properties develop from inorganic components to how cognitive processes emerge in natural or artificial systems. The ″European″, in European Conference on Artificial Life - ECAL, merely refers to the conference location, but participation is worldwide. In this ECAL we envisage maintaining and enlarging this worldwide scope and want to emphatically encourage novelty and daring ideas, particularly amongst young researchers. We welcome both technical and conceptual papers, in all areas of the field, including but ...

Today I went to an Open Workshop of the EU-funded CREEN project (Critical Events in Evolving Networks). The members of the consortium are working on different models for network evolution, very interesting stuff. They have compiled a catalogue of critical events in complex networks , which gives a very nice and brief introduction to the main concepts relevant to this topic. They have produced several interesting papers, but some of them are still not online...

Marko and Jen are testing the possibility of using prediction markets as an alternative/complement of peer review. So, you can trade with my submitted papers... A General Methodology for Designing Self-Organizing Systems Towards Self-organizing Bureaucracies You can also add your papers under review, just go to http://cdms.inklingmarkets.com/

A couple of weeks ago I went to the lecture "Qu'es-ce que l'émergence?" by Hugues Bersini , as a part of the Seminar series " Penser La Science ", in honor of Ilya Prigogine . "Emergence" has been a widely used and abused term, with the drawback that there is no agreed definition of it. As Jack Cohen puts it: "Emergence is like pornography. I cannot define it, but I know when I see it." Well, we can say that emergent properties are those that are not present in the components of a system, but are a product of their interactions. Phil Anderson gives the nice example of gold: its atoms do not have temperature, malleability, conductivity, colour, etc. that a piece of the metal has. Thus these properties "emerge" from the interactions between atoms. Similarly, cells are made of non-living molecules, but their interactions generate properties that we call "living", so we can say that life is an emergent property. What Bersi...