Complexity Digest 2010.01

2010/01/05

Editor-in-Chief: Carlos Gershenson
Founding Editor: Gottfried Mayer

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Previous issue 2009.26 | Next issue 2010.02

Content

  1. BioLogistics and the strugge for efficiency: concepts and perspectives, Advances in Complex Systems
  2. News 2009, Nature
    1. 2009 Gallery: Images of the year, Nature
  3. Population Structure Induces a Symmetry Breaking Favoring the Emergence of Cooperation, PLoS Comput Biol
    1. Calculating Evolutionary Dynamics in Structured Populations, PLoS Comput Biol
  4. Road planning with slime mould: If Physarum built motorways it would route M6/M74 through Newcastle, arXiv
  5. Group Chase and Escape, arXiv
  6. Reappraising Sexual Coevolution and the Sex Roles, PLoS Biol
  7. An Experiment on Prediction Markets in Science, PLoS ONE
  8. Ageing: Diet and longevity in the balance, Nature
  9. Evolutionary Plasticity and Innovations in Complex Metabolic Reaction Networks., PLoS Comput Biol
    1. Systematic Approximations for Genetic Dynamics, Advances in Complex Systems
  10. On the “Duel” Nature of History: Revisiting Contingency versus Determinism, PLoS Biol
  11. Predictive Analysis for Social Diffusion: The Role of Network Communities, arXiv
    1. Untangling the interplay between epidemic spreading and transmission network dynamic, arXiv
    2. Robustness of centrality measures under uncertainty: Examining the role of network topology, Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory
  12. After Copenhagen, Nature
  13. Stochastic evolutionary dynamics of direct reciprocity, Proc. R. Soc. B
    1. Joint evolution of multiple social traits: a kin selection analysis, Proc. R. Soc. B
  14. Words as alleles: connecting language evolution with Bayesian learners to models of genetic drift, Proc. R. Soc. B
  15. “Deconstructing” Scientific Research: A Practical and Scalable Pedagogical Tool to Provide Evidence-Based Science Instruction, PLoS Biol
  16. ON/OFF and Beyond - A Boolean Model of Apoptosis, PLoS Comput Biol
  17. Reproducibility Distinguishes Conscious from Nonconscious Neural Representations, Science
  18. Complex dependencies in large software systems, Advances in Complex Systems
  19. Book Announcements
    1. Nonlinear Dynamics in Economics, Finance and the Social Sciences: Essays in Honour of John Barkley Rosser Jr, Springer
    2. Spatial Complexity, Informatics, and Wildlife Conservation, Springer
    3. Mathematical Analysis of Evolution, Information, and Complexity, Wiley-VCH
    4. Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition, Harvard Business School Press
    5. What is Science?: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, University Press of America
  20. Links & Snippets
    1. Other Publications
    2. Conference Announcements
    3. Webcast Announcements
    4. Other Announcements

  1. BioLogistics and the strugge for efficiency: concepts and perspectives, Advances in Complex Systems Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Abstract: The growth of world population, limitation of resources, economic problems, and environmental issues force engineers to develop increasingly efficient solutions for logistic systems. Pure optimization for efficiency, however, has often led to technical solutions that are vulnerable to variations in supply and demand, and to perturbations. In contrast, nature already provides a large variety of efficient, flexible, and robust logistic solutions. Can we utilize biological principles to design systems, which can flexibly adapt to hardly predictable, fluctuating conditions? We propose a bio-inspired "BioLogistics" approach to deduce dynamic organization processes and principles of adaptive self-control from biological systems, and to transfer them to man-made logistics (including nanologistics), using principles of modularity, self-assembly, self-organization, and decentralized coordination. Conversely, logistic models can help revealing the logic of biological processes at the systems level.

  2. News 2009, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: H1N1 swept the planet (...) The LHC broke a world record (...) Climate e-mails were hacked (...) The Moon was found to be damp (...) Obama boosted US science (...) Science weathered the recession (...)
    • Source: News 2009, Lizzie Buchen, DOI: 10.1038/462962a, Nature 462, 962-963, 2009/12/23

    1. 2009 Gallery: Images of the year, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Abstract:
      Magnificent Mandelbrot
      Maths shows its beautiful side in the first true three-dimensional representations of the Mandelbrot set. Created by computer programmer Daniel White from Bedford, UK, this is the eerily beautiful 'Mandelbulb'.
      Credit: Daniel White
      Take a tour through the images that defined 2009, from the murkiest depths of the oceans, where warring worms pepper their enemies with glowing bombs, to the spectacular swirling rainbows thousands of light years away at the heart of the Milky Way. This year has provided a pictorial panoply, with dust-filled volcanic eruptions captured on film by luck, the tiniest of toads at risk of being lost forever and humankind's outpost in space picked out in detail as it passes in front of the Sun.

  3. Population Structure Induces a Symmetry Breaking Favoring the Emergence of Cooperation, PLoS Comput Biol Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Summary: Humans contribute to a broad range of cooperative endeavors. In many of them, the amount or effort contributed often depends on the social context of each individual. Recent evidence has shown how modern societies are grounded in complex and heterogeneous networks of exchange and cooperation, in which some individuals play radically different roles and/or interact more than others. We show that such social heterogeneity drastically affects the behavioral dynamics and promotes cooperative behavior, whenever the social dilemma perceived by each individual is contingent on her/his social context. The multiplicity of roles and contributions induced by realistic population structures is shown to transform an initial defection dominance dilemma into a coordination challenge or even a cooperator dominance game. While locally defection may seem inescapable, globally there is an emergent new dilemma in which cooperation often prevails, illustrating how collective cooperative action may emerge from myopic individual selfishness.

    1. Calculating Evolutionary Dynamics in Structured Populations, PLoS Comput Biol Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Summary: At the center of any evolutionary process is a population of reproducing individuals. The structure of this population can greatly affect the outcome of evolution. If the fitness of an individual is determined by its interactions with others, then we are in the world of evolutionary game theory. The population structure specifies who interacts with whom. We derive a simple formula that holds for a wide class of such evolutionary processes. This formula provides an efficient computational method for studying evolutionary dynamics in structured populations.

  4. Road planning with slime mould: If Physarum built motorways it would route M6/M74 through Newcastle, arXiv Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum is a single cell visible by unaided eye. During its foraging behaviour the cell spans spatially distributed sources of nutrients with a protoplasmic network. Geometrical structure of the protoplasmic networks allows the plasmodium to optimize transfer of nutrients between remote parts of its body, to distributively sense its environment, and make a decentralized decision about further routes of migration. We consider the ten most populated urban areas in United Kingdom and study what would be an optimal layout of transport links between these urban areas from the "plasmodium's point of view". We represent geographical locations of urban areas by oat flakes, inoculate the plasmodium in Greater London area and analyse the plasmodium's foraging behaviour. (...) Results of our scoping experiments show that during its colonization of the experimental space the plasmodium forms a protoplasmic network isomorphic to a network of major motorways except the motorway linking England with Scotland.

  5. Group Chase and Escape, arXiv Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Abstract: We describe here a new theme of one group chasing another, called ``group chase and escape" by presenting a simple model. We will show that even a simple model can show rather rich and complex behavior. In particular, there are cases of the existence an optimal number of chasers for a given the number of escapees (or targets) to minimize the cost of catching all targets. We have also found an indication of self-organized spatial structures formed by both groups.

  6. Reappraising Sexual Coevolution and the Sex Roles, PLoS Biol Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: The history of evolutionary biology illustrates how theory shapes what we see and don't see in nature. Over the past 30 years, theoretical reappraisals in two areas of evolutionary research"sexual coevolution and the sex roles"have challenged longstanding ideas and yielded rich harvests of startling observations. This process continues apace.

  7. An Experiment on Prediction Markets in Science, PLoS ONE Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Prediction markets are powerful forecasting tools. They have the potential to aggregate private information, to generate and disseminate a consensus among the market participants, and to provide incentives for information acquisition. These market functionalities can be very valuable for scientific research. Here, we report an experiment that examines the compatibility of prediction markets with the current practice of scientific publication.

  8. Ageing: Diet and longevity in the balance, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Summary: Dietary restriction promotes longevity but impairs fecundity in many organisms. When the amino acids in a diet are fine-tuned, however, lifespan can be increased without loss of fecundity " at least in fruitflies.

  9. Evolutionary Plasticity and Innovations in Complex Metabolic Reaction Networks., PLoS Comput Biol Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Summary: Understanding the fundamental processes that shape the evolution of bacterial organisms is of general interest to biology and may have important applications in medicine. We address the questions of how bacterial organisms acquire innovations, including drug resistance, allowing them to survive in new environments. We simulate the evolution of the metabolic network, the network of reactions that can occur inside a living organism. The metabolic network of an organism depends on the genes contained in its genome and can change by gaining genes from other organisms through horizontal gene transfer or loss of gene activity through mutations. Our observations suggest that the robustness to gene loss in Escherichia coli is typical of random viable metabolic networks of the same size. We also find that metabolic networks can change significantly without causing the loss of an organism's ability to survive in a given environment. This property allows organisms to explore a wide range of novel metabolic abilities and is the source of their ability to innovate. Finally we present a method to find reactions that are essential across all organisms. Drugs targeting such a reaction may avoid drug resistance mutations that bypass the reaction.

    1. Systematic Approximations for Genetic Dynamics, Advances in Complex Systems Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Abstract: Although much progress has been made in recent years in describing the dynamics of genetic systems, both in population genetics and evolutionary computation, there is still a conspicuous lack of tools with which to derive systematic, approximate solutions to their dynamics. In this article, we propose and study perturbation theory and the renormalization group as potential tools to fill this gap. We concentrate mainly on selection"mutation systems, showing different implementations of the perturbative framework, developing, for example, perturbative expansions for the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the transition matrix. The main focus, however, is on diagrammatic methods, taken from physics, where we show how approximations can be built up using a pictorial representation generated by a simple set of rules, and how the renormalization group can be used to systematically improve the perturbation theory.

  10. On the “Duel” Nature of History: Revisiting Contingency versus Determinism, PLoS Biol Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt:
    What is the relationship between external"physical and biological"influences on increasingly complex matter over billions of years? In his most recent book, Islands in the Cosmos: The Evolution of Life on Land , Dale Russell attempts to answer this question. Russell is the senior curator of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and, among other things, is well known for proposing in 1971 an extraterrestrial cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs [2]. This places Russell among the first paleontologists to consider this extinction as a relatively sudden event in Earth's history. Dale Russell has spent his lifetime pondering grand evolutionary questions, and it is a quest that Islands in the Cosmos well illustrates.

  11. Predictive Analysis for Social Diffusion: The Role of Network Communities, arXiv Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: The diffusion of information and behaviors over social networks is of considerable interest in research fields ranging from sociology to computer science and application domains such as marketing, finance, human health, and national security. Of particular interest is the possibility to develop predictive capabilities for social diffusion, for instance enabling early identification of diffusion processes which are likely to become "viral" and propagate to a significant fraction of the population. (...) We explore these hypotheses with case studies involving the emergence of the Swedish Social Democratic Party at the turn of the 20th century, the spread of the SARS virus in 2002-2003, and blogging dynamics associated with real world protest activity. These empirical studies demonstrate that network community-based diffusion metrics do indeed possess predictive power, and in fact can be more useful than standard measures.

    1. Untangling the interplay between epidemic spreading and transmission network dynamic, arXiv Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpt: Epidemic spreading of infectious diseases is ubiquitous and has often considerable impact on public health and economic wealth. The large variability in spatio-temporal patterns of epidemics prohibits simple interventions and demands for a detailed analysis of each epidemic with respect to its infectious agent and the corresponding routes of transmission. To facilitate this analysis, a mathematical framework is introduced which links epidemic patterns to the topology and dynamics of the underlying transmission network.

    2. Robustness of centrality measures under uncertainty: Examining the role of network topology, Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Abstract: This study investigates the topological form of a network and its impact on the uncertainty entrenched in descriptive measures computed from observed social network data, given ubiquitous data-error. We investigate what influence a network’s topology, in conjunction with the type and amount of error, has on the ability of a measure, derived from observed data, to correctly approximate the same of the ground-truth network. By way of a controlled experiment, we reveal the differing effect that observation error has on measures of centrality and local clustering across several network topologies: uniform random, small-world, core-periphery, scale-free, and cellular. Beyond what is already known about the impact of data uncertainty, we found that the topology of a social network is, indeed, germane to the accuracy of these measures. In particular, our experiments show that the accuracy of identifying the prestigious, or key, actors in a network"according observed data"is considerably predisposed by the topology of the ground-truth network.

  12. After Copenhagen, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: It is easy to feel disappointed by the accord brokered last week by US President Barack Obama at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen. The document's broad outlines do not constitute a treaty, nor is it even clear whether it should technically be called a global agreement. Crafted principally by a handful of nations " the United States, China, India, Brazil and South Africa " the accord was presented as a take-it-or-leave-it fait accompli to representatives of the nearly 200 other nations in attendance, few of whom had been consulted. The resulting protests nearly led to the convention's collapse (...)
    • Source: After Copenhagen, Editorial, DOI: 10.1038/462957b, Nature 462, 957, 2009/12/24

  13. Stochastic evolutionary dynamics of direct reciprocity, Proc. R. Soc. B Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Evolutionary game theory is the study of frequency-dependent selection. The success of an individual depends on the frequencies of strategies that are used in the population. We propose a new model for studying evolutionary dynamics in games with a continuous strategy space. [...] We find that ‘tit-for-tat’ is a weak catalyst for the emergence of cooperation, while ‘always cooperate’ is a strong catalyst for the emergence of defection. Our analysis leads to a new understanding of the optimal level of forgiveness that is needed for the evolution of cooperation under direct reciprocity.

    1. Joint evolution of multiple social traits: a kin selection analysis, Proc. R. Soc. B Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpt: General models of the evolution of cooperation, altruism and other social behaviours have focused almost entirely on single traits, whereas it is clear that social traits commonly interact. We develop a general kin-selection framework for the evolution of social behaviours in multiple dimensions. We show that whenever there are interactions among social traits new behaviours can emerge that are not predicted by one-dimensional analyses.

  14. Words as alleles: connecting language evolution with Bayesian learners to models of genetic drift, Proc. R. Soc. B Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Scientists studying how languages change over time often make an analogy between biological and cultural evolution, with words or grammars behaving like traits subject to natural selection. Recent work has exploited this analogy by using models of biological evolution to explain the properties of languages and other cultural artefacts. However,...

  15. “Deconstructing” Scientific Research: A Practical and Scalable Pedagogical Tool to Provide Evidence-Based Science Instruction, PLoS Biol Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: There is growing interest among scientists and science educators to include active learning approaches that allow students to appreciate how primary evidence is used to construct scientific knowledge [1],[2]. Indeed, the National Academies and others have recognized four essential objectives for science education at elementary, middle and high school, and undergraduate levels: (1) understanding and utilizing scientific explanations of the natural world, (2) knowing how to generate and evaluate scientific evidence, (3) understanding the nature and development of scientific knowledge, and (4) participating productively in scientific practices and discourse [2]"[5].

  16. ON/OFF and Beyond - A Boolean Model of Apoptosis, PLoS Comput Biol Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Summary: Apoptosis is one of the most investigated topics in the life sciences, especially as this kind of programmed cell death has been linked to several diseases. The strong desire to understand the function and regulation of apoptosis is unfortunately confronted with its complexity and its high degree of cross linking within the cell. Therefore we apply the so-called logical or Boolean mathematical modeling approach to comprehensively describe the numerous interactions in the apoptotic network. Classical Boolean modeling assumes that a certain cellular signal is either present (on) or absent (off). We use extensions of classical Boolean models, namely timescale constants and multi-value nodes, which allow the model to emulate typical apoptotic features. The mathematical model describes for the first time the numerous relevant interactions and signals that control apoptosis in a single and coherent framework. The logical model of apoptosis provides valuable information about the topology of the network including feedback loops and crosstalk effects. Proper investigation of the mutual interactions between species points towards hubs in the network with outstanding relevance. These species are of special interest concerning experimental intervention as well as drug target search. The model we present here is easy to use and freely available.

  17. Reproducibility Distinguishes Conscious from Nonconscious Neural Representations, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Abstract: What qualifies a neural representation for a role in subjective experience? Previous evidence suggests that the duration and intensity of the neural response to a sensory stimulus are factors. We introduce another attribute"the reproducibility of a pattern of neural activity across different episodes"that predicts specific and measurable differences between conscious and nonconscious neural representations indepedently of duration and intensity. We found that conscious neural activation patterns are relatively reproducible when compared with nonconscious neural activation patterns corresponding to the same perceptual content. This is not adequately explained by a difference in signal-to-noise ratio.

  18. Complex dependencies in large software systems, Advances in Complex Systems Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Abstract: Two large, open source software systems are analyzed from the vantage point of complex adaptive systems theory. For both systems, the full dependency graphs are constructed and their properties are shown to be consistent with the assumption of stochastic growth. In particular, the afferent links are distributed according to Zipf's law for both systems. Using the small-world criterion for directed graphs, it is shown that contrary to claims in the literature, these software systems do not possess small-world properties. Furthermore, it is argued that the small-world property is not of any particular advantage in a standard layered architecture. Finally, it is suggested that the eigenvector centrality can play an important role in deciding which open source software packages to use in mission-critical applications. This comes about because knowing the absolute number of afferent links alone is insufficient to decide how important a package is to the system as a whole, instead the importance of the linking package plays a major role as well.

  19. Book Announcements Next Article Bookmark and Share

    1. Nonlinear Dynamics in Economics, Finance and the Social Sciences: Essays in Honour of John Barkley Rosser Jr, Springer Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Summary:
      Over the last two decades there has been a great deal of research into nonlinear dynamic models in economics, finance and the social sciences. This book contains twenty papers that range over very recent applications in these areas. Topics covered include structural change and economic growth, disequilibrium dynamics and economic policy as well as models with boundedly rational agents. The book illustrates some of the most recent research tools in this area and will be of interest to economists working in economic dynamics and to mathematicians interested in seeing ideas from nonlinear dynamics and complexity theory applied to the economic sciences.

    2. Spatial Complexity, Informatics, and Wildlife Conservation, Springer Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Summary:
      As Earth faces the greatest mass extinction in 65 million years, the present is a moment of tremendous foment and emergence in ecological science. With leaps in advances in ecological research and the technical tools available, scientists face the critical task of challenging policymakers and the public to recognize the urgency of our global crisis. This book focuses directly on the interplay between theory, data, and analytical methodology in the rapidly evolving fields of animal ecology, conservation, and management. The mixture of topics of particular current relevance includes landscape ecology, remote sensing, spatial modeling, geostatistics, genomics, and ecological informatics.

    3. Mathematical Analysis of Evolution, Information, and Complexity, Wiley-VCH Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Summary:
      This book deals with the analysis of evolution, information and complexity. The time evolution of systems or processes is a central question in science, this text covers a broad range of problems including diffusion processes, neuronal networks, quantum theory and cosmology. Bringing together a wide collection of research in mathematics, information theory, physics and other scientific and technical areas, this new title offers elementary and thus easily accessible introductions to the various fields of research addressed in the book.

    4. Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition, Harvard Business School Press Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Summary:
      Leaders in all fields-business, medicine, law, government-make crucial decisions every day. The harsh truth is that they mismanage many of those choices, even though they have the right intentions. These blunders take a huge toll on leaders, their organizations, and the people they serve. Why is it so hard to make sound decisions? We fall victim to simplified mental routines that prevent us from coping with the complex realities inherent in important judgment calls. Yet these cognitive errors are preventable. In Think Twice, Michael Mauboussin shows you how to recognize-and avoid-common mental missteps.

    5. What is Science?: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, University Press of America Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Description:
      This book seeks to define science conceptually. The emergence of science made possible the industrial revolution and the development of a multitude of scientific disciplines, all very successful in advancing understanding of the world and of ourselves. What makes science more efficient in advancing our knowledge than any other heuristics?

  20. Links & Snippets Next Article Bookmark and Share

    1. Other Publications Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. Elongated Polyproline Motifs Facilitate Enamel Evolution through Matrix Subunit Compaction, Tianquan Jin, Yoshihiro Ito, Xianghong Luan, Smit Dangaria, Cameron Walker, Michael Allen, Ashok Kulkarni, Carolyn Gibson, Richard Braatz, Xiubei Liao, Thomas G. H. Diekwisch, 2009/12/22, PLoS Biol 7(12): e1000262, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000262
      2. Emergent Patterns of Social Affiliation in Primates, a Model, Ivan Puga-Gonzalez, Hanno Hildenbrandt, Charlotte K. Hemelrijk, 2009/12/24, PLoS Comput Biol 5(12): e1000630, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000630
      3. Ultimate Traces of Cellular Automata, Julien Cervelle and Enrico Formenti and Pierre Guillon, 2010/01/01, arXiv:1001.0251

    2. Conference Announcements Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. 2nd Winter School in Complexity Sciences "Formal approaches for the representation and analysis of social network structures" , Lisbon, Portugal, 2010/01/11-15
      2. Conference on Dynamics of Layering in Biological Systems, Pasadena, California, USA, 2010/01/15-16
      3. 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART 2010), Valencia, Spain, 10/01/22-24
      4. Fluctuations, information flow and experimental measurements., Paris, , 2010/01/26-27
      5. QualityCommons, an interdisciplinary workshop on collective quality representations and the social processes behind them, Paris, France, 2010/01/28"29
      6. Networks: A Framework for cross-disciplinary applications,Zaragoza, Spain, 2010/02/3-6
      7. The International Seminar on the Emergence and Evolution of Linguistic Communication (JAIST-EELC2010), Kyoto, Japan, 2010/03/10-12
      8. 4th International Nonlinear Science Conference, University of Palermo, Sicily, 2010/03/15-17
      9. 20th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research, EMCSR 2010, University of Vienna, Austria, 10/04/6-9
      10. EvoStar 2010 , Istanbul, Turkey, 10/04/7-10
      11. International Conference on Computer Supported Education, Valencia, Spain, 10/04/7-10
      12. EmergeNET4: Engineering Emergence, York, UK, 2010/04/19-20
      13. AAMAS-2010, the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Toronto Canada, 2010/05/10-14
      14. The IV International Workshop on Nature Inspired Cooperative Strategies for Optimization - NICSO 2010, Granada, Spain, 10/05/12-14
      15. International Conference on Computational Science 2010 (ICCS 2010), University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2010/05/31-06/2
      16. ICEIS 2010 (12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems), Funchal-Madeira, Portugal, 10/06/6-10
      17. ICAC 2010, the 7th IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing, Washington, DC, USA, 2010/06/7-11
      18. International Conference on Information Society (i-Society 2010) , London, UK, 2010/06/28-30
      19. Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2010), Portland, Oregon, USA, 2010/07/7-11
      20. The 2010 Advanced Geographical Analysis and Modeling Workshop, Neve Ilan, Israel, 2010/07/8-10
      21. 2010 World Congress on Computational Intelligence, Barcelona, Spain, 10/07/18-23
      22. The 2010 International Conference on Informatics Cypernetics, and Computer Applications (ICICCA2010), Bangalore, India, 2010/07/19-20
      23. European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI), Copenhagen, Denmark, 10/08/09-20
      24. Amorphous Computing and Complex Biological Networks, University of Sheffield, UK, 2010/08-17-20
      25. Artificial Life XII (ALife XII), Odense, Denmark, 10/08/19--23
      26. From animals to animats: the Eleventh International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB'10), , Paris, France, 2010/08/24-28
      27. 2010 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI-10), Toronto, Canada, 2010/08/31-09/03
      28. ANTS 2010, Seventh International Conference on Swarm Intelligence, Brussels, Belgium, 10/09/8-10
      29. European Conference on Complex Systems, Lisbon, Portugal, 2010/09/13-17

    3. Webcast Announcements Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. Smarter Cities NYC. Posted on 2009/10/05

      2. ASSYST Digital Library. Since 09/09

      3. Complex Systems Teleconferences. Since 09/09

      4. Symmetry Festival 2009, Budapest, Hungary, 09/08/1-4.

      5. International Workshop on Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems, Zurich, Switzerland, 09/06/8-12

      6. Memorial Service for Dr Gottfried Mayer, Founding Editor Complexity Digest, Taipei, Taiwan (1954-2009). Video [RM], 09/02/13

      7. Making Connections: In Memory and Celebration of the Life of Dr. Gottfried Mayer (1954-2009). Video [RM] [MPG], 09/02/13

      8. Eulogy for Gottfried Mayer by Dean LeBaron [WMV, 25 Mb], [RM, 10 Mb], 09/02/10

      9. Can Ants Solve Traffic Jams?, Danielle Parsons, Slatev.com, 08/07/22

      10. Reseau Nationale des Systemes Complexes , (in French), 2007
      11. World Economic Forum , Davos, Switzerland, 08/01/22-27
      12. TED Talks, TED Conferences LLC , since 2006
      13. Talking Robots: The PodCast on Robotics and AI, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland, 06/11/03
      14. Potentials of Complexity Science for Business, Governments, and the Media 2006, Budapest, Hungary, 06/08/03-05
      15. 6th Intl Conf on Complex Systems (ICCS), Boston, MA, 06/06/25-30
      16. Artificial Life X, 10th Intl Conf on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems, Bloomington, IN, USA. 2006/06/03-07
      17. 6th Understanding Complex Systems Symposium, Urbana-Champaign, Il, 06/05/15-18
      18. Ralph Abraham on Complexity Digest, , Calcutta, India, 05/12/27
      19. An Afternoon with Michael Crichton, Washington, 05/11/06
      20. Illuminating the Shadow of the Future, Ann Arbor, Mi 05/09/23-25
      21. Open Network of Centres of Excellence in Complex Systems - Brainstorming Meeting, Paris, France 05/09/19-23
      22. Complexity, Science & Society Conference 2005, U. Liverpool, UK 2005/09/11-14
      23. ECAL 2005 - VIIIth European Conference on Artificial Life, Canterbury, Kent, UK 2005/09/5-9
      24. T. Irene Sanders, Executive Director and Founder, The Washington Center for Complexity & Public Policy, 05/08/27, QuickTime video (10:38 min), Podcast
      25. North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity 2005 Conference, Virtual Conference Network, St. Pete's Beach, Florida, 05/06/09-11
      26. Understanding Complex Systems - Computational Complexity and Bioinformatics, Virtual Conference Network, Urbana-Champaign, Il, UIUC, 05/05/16-19
      27. Nonlinearity, Fluctuations, and Complexity, with a celebration of the 65th birthday of Gregoire Nicolis. , Complexity Session, Universite' Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium, 05/03/16
      28. 1st European Conference on Complex Systems, Torino, Italy, 04/12/5-7
      29. From Autopoiesis to Neurophenomenology: A Tribute to Francisco Varela (1946-2001), Paris, France, 2004/06/18-20
      30. Evolutionary Epistemology, Language, and Culture, Brussels, Belgium, 04/05/26-28
      31. International Conference on Complex Systems 2004, Boston, 04/05/16-21
      32. Nonlinear Dynamics And Chaos: Lab Demonstrations, Strogatz, Steven H., Internet-First University Press, 1994
      33. CERN Webcast Service, Streamed videos of Archived Lectures and Live Events
      34. Dean LeBaron's Archive of Daily Video Commentary, Ongoing Since February 1998
      35. Edge Videos

    4. Other Announcements Bookmark and Share

      • ASSYSTComplexity
        One of the main goals of the ASSYST Coordination Action is to promote Complex Systems for Socially Intelligent ICT (COSI-ICT) and, more generally, Complex Systems (CS) Science in Europe and Worldwide. We do this by communicating widely with scientists, policy makers, and business people, and by showcasing success stories of CS applications.
      • Job openings in Complex Systems
      • Call for Collaboration: the VISIONEER Project .
      • Tenurometer provides a smart interface to make Google Scholar more powerful, convenient, and easy to use. Unlike *Publish or Perish*, Tenurometer is not a standalone application; it is a browser extension, so it can be used on any computer with a Firefox browser.
        There is a twist. By using Tenurometer you help tag authors and contribute to a social database of annotations, associating authors, papers, and disciplines. We plan to make this data publicly available for research purposes. All you do is use Tenurometer for your own purposes, and submit one or more discipline tags when you query. Statistics from the annotations are available on the Tenurometer website.
        In addition to providing various established impact measures such as the h-index, Tenurometer leverages the statistics collected from user annotations to make it possible for the first time to compute the "universal h-index" (Radicchi & al, PNAS 2008). This measure is designed to quantitatively compare the impact of authors in different disciplines, with different citation patterns. While citation analysis has its well-known limitations and must be used with care, the universal h-index and its implementation may represent an important step toward meaningful comparative evaluation of research impact across diverse disciplines in science, the social sciences, arts and humanities.
      • A new Masters programme in Complex Systems is launched, as a joint venture of Univ. of Warwick (UK), Ecole Polytechnique (Paris) and Chalmers Univ. & Univ. of Gothenburg (Sweden), in partnership with the Complex Systems Society.
        Through the Erasmus Mundus scheme, there are full scholarships for 10-12 overseas students (deadline 4 Jan) and partial scholarships for up to 8 European students (deadline 4 May).

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