Complexes

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...

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.

Butterflies have four wings. Can they fly with only two? This question arose this week. My wife and daughter had picked up a butterfly cocoon to see how the butterfly emerged and later free her. But our naughty/lovely cat bit on the cocoon. So when the butterfly came out, her right wings were damaged. She couldn't fly. Still, to answer the question of this post, if the hind wings are missing, butterflies can fly, their flight is amazingly robust. This is a nice example of how reductionism fails to see the function of systems by ignoring their interactions. You can have two out of four wings, but a butterfly will fly or not, live or die, depending on how the remaining wings interact . Looking only at individual wings will not tell you much about the capabilities of the insect.

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

Self-organization in the context of computing systems refers to a technological approach to deal with the increasing complexity associated with the deployment, maintenance, and evolution of such systems. The terms self-organizing and autonomous are often used interchangeably in relation to systems that use organic principles (self-configuration, self-healing, and so on) in their design and operation. In the specific case of system on chip (SoC) design, organic principles are clearly in the solution path for some of the most important challenges in areas like logic organization, data movement, circuits, and software. In this article, we start by providing a definition of the concept of self-organization as it applies to SoCs, explaining what it means and how it may be applied. We then provide a survey of the various recent papers, journal articles, and books on the subject and close by pointing out possible future directions, challenges and opportunities for self-organizing SoCs. De ...

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.

Ultra-large scale (ULS) systems are becoming pervasive. They are inherently complex, which makes their design and control a challenge for traditional methods. Here we propose the design and analysis of ULS systems using measures of complexity, emergence, self-organization, and homeostasis based on information theory. We evaluate the proposal with a ULS computing system provided with genetic adaptation mechanisms. We show the evolution of the system with stable and also changing workload, using different fitness functions. When the adaptive plan forces the system to converge to a predefined performance level, the nodes may result in highly unstable configurations, that correspond to a high variance in time of the measured complexity. Conversely, if the adaptive plan is less "aggressive", the system may be more stable, but the optimal performance may not be achieved. Measuring the Complexity of Ultra-Large-Scale Evolutionary Systems, Michele Amoretti, Carlos Gershenson. Subm...