Complexes

//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...