Complexes

The equal headway instability—the fact that a configuration with regular time intervals between vehicles tends to be volatile—is a common regulation problem in public transportation systems. An unsatisfactory regulation results in low efficiency and possible collapses of the service. Computational simulations have shown that self-organizing methods can regulate the headway adaptively beyond the theoretical optimum. In this work, we develop a computer simulation for metro systems fed with real data from the Mexico City Metro to test the current regulatory method with a novel self-organizing approach. The current model considers overall system’s data such as minimum and maximum waiting times at stations, while the self-organizing method regulates the headway in a decentralized manner using local information such as the passenger’s inflow and the positions of neighboring trains. The simulation shows that the self-organizing method improves the performance over the current one as it adapts...

//Please forward to whom might be interested CCS'17: The Conference on Complex Systems 2017  Cancun, Mexico. September 17-22.  http://ccs17.unam.mx The flagship conference of the  Complex Systems Society  will go to Latin America for the first time in 2017. The Mexican complex systems community is enthusiast to welcome colleagues to one of our richest destinations: Cancun. The conference will include presentations by the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry Mario Molina (environment), Raissa D'Souza (network science), Ranulfo Romo (neuroscience), Jaime Urrutia-Fucugauchi (geophysics), Antonio Lazcano (origins of life), Marta González (human mobility), Dirk Brockmann (epidemiology), Kristina Lerman (information sciences), Stefano Battiston (economics), John Quackenbush (computational biology), Giovanna Miritello (data science), and more TBA. We invite abstract contributions (500 words maximum) for oral presentations or posters in the follow...

Urban mobility systems are composed multiple elements with strong interactions, i.e. their future is co-determined by the state of other elements. Thus, studying components in isolation, i.e. using a reductionist approach, is inappropriate. I propose five recommendations to improve urban mobility based on insights from the scientific study of complex systems: use adaptation over prediction, regulate interactions to avoid friction, use sensors to recover real time information, develop adaptive algorithms to exploit that information, and deploy agents to act on the urban environment. Improving Urban Mobility by Understanding its Complexity Carlos Gershenson http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.04267

ALife XV: The Fifteenth International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems will take place in Cancun, Mexico, on July 4-8, 2016.  The deadline for paper and abstract submissions was extended to  February 29th . This extension is final.  All accepted contributions will be published by MIT Press as open online proceedings. There are two submission options: Full papers (8 pages) should report on new, unpublished work. Extended abstracts (2 pages) can report on previously published work, but offer a new perspective on that work. Submitted or novel work is also acceptable for abstracts. Accepted works will be selected as oral or poster presentations. Submissions can be made also for a  Special Session on ALife and Society . The  Call for Artworks  is out. Accepted Workshops and Tutorials will be announced soon. We are happy to announce that our keynote speakers cover a wide variety of topics and include  R...

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...

I do not think that the resignation of our president Enrique Peña Nieto would be positive in the short term. Instability probably would increase. But I want to share why so many people are asking for his resignation, also because the news are not even reaching the majority of the Mexican population. Peña had a controversial campaign, with thousands of reported electoral irregularities . After two years in office, the violence in the country continues , and many other promises are still to be materialized. But all this is normal Mexican politics. Previous presidents in similar situations have not met such a rejection from the national and international communities. The straw that broke the camel's back was the dissapearance and possible murder of 43 students in the village of Ayotzinapa , in the southern state of Guerrro (Acapulco is also in that state, and was last year the 3rd most violent city in the world). The students were intecepted by the local police, there were 6 ki...

On November 10th, a day after the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall , our team Living Mobilities from Mexico City was declared winner of the third edition of the Audi Urban Future Award . Together with José Castillo (team leader, watch the video from his final presentation ) from Arquitectura 911 and Gabriella Gómez-Mont from the Laboratorio para la Ciudad , we were proud and delighted to be declared winners by an international jury , considering the great proposals presented by the teams from Berlin, Boston, and Seoul. Audi Urban Future Award 2014 - Data collectors from Mexico City win the Award 2014 from THE AUDI URBAN FUTURE INITIATIVE on Vimeo . Our project proposes to create a new social contract, assisted by technology, to improve mobility not only in terms of efficiency, but also in terms of quality of life. This focusses on Mexico City, but has the potential to be extended to other megacities in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. We have a big city wi...

//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...

Large cities benefit from public transport. It is simply more efficient to transport hundreds or thousands of people together (trans, trams, buses) than each of them individually (cars, taxis). However, public transportation systems have to match the passenger demand. If there are relatively too few passengers for the public transport capacity, there will be idling and waste of resources. If there are relatively too many passengers, the system will be saturated and become inefficient. This balance between public transport capacity and demand is very tricky, since many cities change their transportation demands much faster than their public transport infrastructure. There is also a clear correlation between the cost, building time, and capacity of transportation systems. Trains and metros are high cost, high capacity, making them unsuitable for cities of roughtly less than a million inhabitants. Trams and bus rapid transit (BRT) are intermediate: they have less capacity, but they...

The Mexican federal electoral tribunal rejected the demand for the nulification of the presidential election yesterday. The magistrates say that proofs are not sufficient. I do not know who are they trying to fool. Everybody knows about the irregularities and we received thousands of proofs at  Contamos . But also the millions who got material benefits from PRI know it first hand. Where did all the money come from, we don't know, but it is either deviated from public money for electoral purposes, or from organized crime. Which one is worse? Illegal in any case. There is a huge social discontent. Regrettably, it is only fitting for a soap opera president: to become "elected" with such a farse. On your TV sets from December 1st.

Enrique Peña Nieto obtained the majority of votes on July 1st. However, there is huge evidence of electoral crimes committed by his party (paying people for votes, conditioning public services for votes, use of public resources for campaigns, etc.) and an obvious excess of campaign spending limits. The Electoral Federal Court has to announce a result on the election by September 6th, with a large sector of the population demanding new elections, which would imply an interim president.

In recent days, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) the presidential candidate from the Mexican left parties gave a jump in the polls (at least those which are not obviously biased). This was mainly because of the self-organized movement "#YoSoy132", initiated by students and now followed by thousands of people in all the country, mainly rejecting the imposition of a candidate by the media (Enrique Peña Nieto, EPN from PRI) and by the circles of power (even expresident Vicente Fox from PAN called to vote for him, obviously causing outrage in his party. The thing is that if AMLO wins, most probably he'll end un in jail). Seeing the support for AMLO grow, the other two main parties (PRI and PAN) started a similar strategy to that of 2006, discrediting AMLO with a "dirty war". A few days ago each party released a TV spot where they forged in one case a conversation and in another an AMLO speech (video in Spanish here ). What can you expect from political parties...

The presidential elections in Mexico next July 1st are heating up the political landscape. It has always been a tradition that most media support some candidate, in this case Enrique Peña Nieto (EPN) from PRI, who is ahead in their questionable polls. However, the information spreading on social networks is something they still cannot control. On Friday, May 11th, EPN went to the Universidad Iberoamericana, one of the most recognized private universities in the country, where the students demonstrated their rejection towards him. Of course, none of this was seen in most media, one newspaper even Photoshopping their frontpage picture : However, with half the students filming every moment with their smartphones, the real deal spread like wildfire on social networks and youtube . One of the claims to EPN was a police operation in the town of Atenco in the outskirts of Mexico City, while EPN was governor of the State of Mexico. State and federal police arrested dozens of people, r...

I've been meaning to start posting about the upcoming presidential elections to be held in Mexico on July 1st. The current government of Felipe Caledrón (who began his presidency in 2006 amidst proofs of fraud ) has been characterized by a stagnation of the economy and a war declared against (most of) the drug cartels, leading to at least 60,000 people killed so far. Only in Ciudad Juárez, we had ten times the murder rate than in Baghdad during the recent U.S. occupation. Last year, a complaint was filed at the International Court in The Hague against Felipe Calderón and others , accusing them of crimes against humanity. The perspective is not positive for Calderón, since he cannot go abroad like other ex-presidents, and most probably his party (PAN) will lose the presidency, given the failures of the two previous presidents: Calderón and Vicente Fox (2000-2006). The candidates: Josefina Vázquez Mota  "JVM" (PAN), former minister of education and leader of her part...

Last November I had the honor of participating in TEDxDF with a talk on self-organizing traffic lights. You can watch the video (in Spanish) at: http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxDF-Carlos-Gershenson-Semfor  or  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QohrFmeNnVw Mejorar el transporte público de la Ciudad de México es una idea que a todos se nos ocurre, pero pocos hacemos algo al respecto. Este no es el caso de Carlos, un apasionado del estudio científico de la complejidad: ¿Cómo podemos diseñar componentes de un sistema para que, por medio de sus interacciones, realicen una función deseada a nivel del sistema? Con su ponencia Carlos responderá esta pregunta y expondrá ideas aplicables al DF para mejorar diversos medios de transporte, afectando positivamente la calidad de vida de la población.

I'll give a keynote talk at the First Mexican Congress on Complexity Sciences, to be held at the University City, within Mexico City, October 4-6, 2010. This first edition is aimed at the Mexican community, so the language is Spanish. More info at:  http://c3.fisica.unam.mx/con2010/ Abstract deadline for oral presentations: August 15th Abstract deadline for posters: August 31st (Students presenting talks or posters have the registration fee waived!)

2010 seems to be a promising year. Here in Mexico, we will celebrate 200 years of the beginning of the Independence (September 16th, 1810) and 100 years of the beginning of the Revolution (November 20th, 1910). By linear extrapolation, we all expect a great event to occur in 2010. But there are different opinions on what precisely will occur. The hope of the people: winning the World Cup. The fear of the people: collapse of the country. The most possible outcome: financial difficulties of historic proportions. The Guajiran dream: the refoundation of the Republic (it has been going down the drain for too long). My personal bet/conspiracy theory: druglords taking over the country followed by a foreign invasion rescue operation.

After several years living abroad (St. Petersburg, Sussex, Brussels, Granada, Boston), it takes a bit of time to get used to life back in Mexico City. Having some frame of comparison, I realized one way to describe the problem with developing countries such as Mexico: there is a high degree of incompetence . Now, it is difficult to measure incompetence (In TeraBushes?), but to understand better what I mean, let us say that an agent (person, business, organization) is more incompetent if there are more tasks that the agent should perform successfully and it does not. I mean, I am quite incompetent in bureaucratic monotonous tedious labours, but these are not my duty (which some people refer to as "professional handwaving", others as "academia"). All countries and all agents have a certain degree of incompetence: nobody is perfect, there will always be errors, especially with novel tasks. Also, all countries and agents have a large degree of functionality, things tha...

Yesterday, an energetic reform was presented by Felipe Calderón (aka FeCal ) to the Mexican senate. It attempts to modify several laws, although these changes violate the constitution. Using fallacies of prosperity for Mexico, the right wing government is attempting to privatize the extraction, transport, and refining of oil and gas. Many arguments and passions and interests can be put forward, but let us simply note the following fact: Oil is the first source of income for Mexico (followed by money sent by more than ten million immigrants in the U.S. to their families, and tourism in third place). The cost of a Mexican oil barrel is around $85 these days, but its production is less than ten. The difference is used to pay for public education, health services, social security, etc. (as deficient as they may be). I fail to see how transmitting this profit to private foreign companies (such as Repsol, Exxon, Texaco, who have already shown obscure and questionable ties to FeCal's tea...

Next month, the film "Fraude: México 2006" by Luis Mandoki will be released in more than 200 Mexican cinemas. You can see the trailer in YouTube (in Spanish...). This documentary gathers evidence filmed by hundreds of people about the fraud of the 2006 presidential elections. The Mexican supreme court already accepted that there had been severe irregularities, but in spite of that, we're stuck with a duck president (Felipe Calderón, aka FeCal), puppet of the people who managed to put him in power. Most recently, AeroMexico was sold to a business group who supported FeCal. I hope that this film will inform better people. There is no doubt about the fraud, there is more than enough evidence for it. But many Mexicans don't know about it (TV companies invested a lot in FeCal), and most don't even care... It is worth noting that Warner Bros, the original distributor of the film, tried to censor it, namely a part that compromises Televisa directives. When the director ...