Complexes

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!)

I'll be co-chairing together with Giovanni Squillero  the Artificial Life/Robotics/Evolvable Hardware track at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO 2011) conference, to be held  in Dublin, Ireland, July 12-16, 2011. More info at the conference website:  http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2011/

I'll be giving a talk at the GSO-3 workshop at Indiana University next september. More info at:  http://informatics.indiana.edu/larryy/gso3/ You can also assist and present, deadline for abstracts is August 16th. Registration is free, but space is limited.

I have been cycling as my main mean of transport for more than ten years. I've had the opportunity to bike in Mexico City (MX), St. Petersburg (RU), Sussex (UK), Brussels (BE), and Boston (MA, USA). I have a childseat for our 2.5 year old daughter, she loves it, and it is quite comfortable. I do not suggest biking to anybody, I just share my experience for people who have made a similar decision. Similarly, I would like to hear from other people's experience. Different places have different degrees of bike-friendliness, even in the same city, depending on several factors. In my experience, the order from best to worse is: UK, BE, USA, MX, RU. Actually, there seems to be a correlation with the number of bikers on the street. Cities with more bikers tend to be friendlier towards them, and friendlier cities tend to attract more bikers. Conclusion: promote biking to make your city bike-friendlier. Pros Speed . Studies from Mexico City and Paris have shown that biking leads to th...

I am co-chairing the technical programme committe, together with Christian Bettstetter , IWSOS 2011, the Fifth International Workshop on Self-Organizing Systems, to be held on February, 23-25, 2011 in Karlsruhe, Germany. The general co-chairs are Martina Zitterbart and Hermann de Meer . Call for Papers will be distributed soon. Check the webpage at http://iwsos2011.tm.kit.edu

My BEng thesis (from 2001) was just published as a book. You can order a hardcopy at Amazon.com . It is still available electronically in pdf and html . Gershenson, C. (2010 ). Artificial Societies of Intelligent Agents: Virtual Experiments of Individual and Social Behaviour . LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, ISBN 3838357736 . Summary : In this book we use artificial societies to understand and simulate adaptive behaviour and social processes. We obtain this in three parallel ways: First, we present a behaviours production system capable of reproducing a high number of properties of adaptive behaviour and of exhibiting emergent lower cognition. Second, we introduce a simple model for social action, obtaining emergent complex social processes from simple interactions of imitation and induction of behaviours in agents. And third, we present our approximation to a behaviours virtual laboratory, integrating our behaviours production system and our social action model in virtual animats. ...

Gershenson, C. (2010). Guiding the Self-organization of Random Boolean Networks. C3 Report 2010.05. Abstract : Random Boolean networks (RBNs) are models of genetic regulatory networks. It is useful to describe RBNs as self-organizing systems to study how changes in the nodes and connections affect the global network dynamics. This article reviews seven different methods for guiding the self-organization of RBNs. In particular, the article is focussed on guiding RBNs towards the critical dynamical regime, which is near the phase transition between the ordered and dynamical phases. The properties and advantages of the critical regime for life, computation, adaptability, evolvability, and robustness are revised. The guidance methods of RBNs can be used for engineering systems with the features of the critical regime, as well as for studying how natural selection evolved living systems, which are also critical. Full text : http://uk.arxiv.org/abs/1005.5733