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Facing the Future

elcome to the April 2011 issue of your ASSYST/CSS Newsletter, where you will be able to find some interesting pointers to future science

in Europe. The Étoile project - "Enhanced Technology for Open Intelligent Learning Environments" started with an exciting debate about how to develop and deploy an open source, scalable and adaptive online system that will deliver learning resources for complex systems studies. A report of this discussion is available inside. Also, one of the most important annual conferences, fet'11 - "The European Future Technologies Conference and Exhibition", is about to start and will include some remarkable talks, from robotics to market dynamics, from language modeling to new computational and mathematical models - please take a look to the abstracts. Finally, the reading snippets, conference calls and announcements will surely catch your attention.

Enjoy!

-- The ASSYST Team

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Number 17, April 2011 | www.assystcomplexity.eu | www.cssociety.org

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A Star is Born

The Étoile project - Enhanced Technology for Open Intelligent Learning Environments

by David Hales

omplex systems science is highly interdisciplinary. The silo-based education provided by most universities creates scientists expert in one

discipline but ignorant of most others. Most PhD programmes require students to learn key ideas from other disciplines relevant to their topic, but knowledge across the community is patchy. This includes basic social science and even the core disciplines of mathematics, statistics, physics and ICT. The Complex Systems Society (CSS) has identified this as a major hindrance to the development of the science.

The étoile project, which started on 1st March, will address these issues through the development and deployment of an open source, scalable and adaptive online system that will deliver learning resources based on a problem oriented approach.

The basic étoile approach is simple: For a given topic area a set of problems will be set by teachers. Students answer them by searching the web for relevant educational resources e.g. videos, wikipedia articles, blog entries, online books etc. Students submit URL's to found resources with their answers producing an ecology of URL's centred around each problem.

Etoile comprises three main partners (the Open University in the UK, Fundacao da Faculdade de Ciencias da Universidade de Lisboa in Portugal and Institut des Systèmes Complexes de Paris in France) and ten associated partners from across Europe and beyond.

The kickoff meeting took place at the Open University campus in Milton Keynes over four days from the 9th-12th of March. This started with an initial kickoff session for etiole partners in which the general aims and mission of the project were discussed. Lisbon presented their pre-prototype etoil system which already provides some of the basic functionality required by the platform.

Following this was a full day of presentations with etoile partners and other Open University faculty members discussing their ongoing work in distance and online

education. The Open University is a pioneering institution in distance learning and a number of highly innovative and interesting approaches were presented. Étoile aims to draw on the best of this massive resource to provide innovative automated marking schemes (including visual methods and Natural Language Processing techniques based on training data from the massive OU datasets).

On the third day, an Art-Science workshop, lead by João Fiadeiro (a choreographer), on Socio-Cognitive Stygmery immersed participants in an open improvisation method. This method uses a form of stygmergic communication, through a shared space and the objects within that space, to trigger an open-ended set of interactions in which the collective product of the participants is not the result of any individual plan or ego. This approach offers the possibility for a revolutionary understanding of human social interaction through stygmergic forms (including those mediated by social media). The workshop produced a very interesting set of outcomes and also led to insights by participants on their styles of creativity and inter-personal interaction.

On the fourth and final day the project partners met to discuss the organisational practicalities and agree the

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initial phase of work. The basic design philosophy of the project is KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid!). Hence the plan is to start simple (as simple as possible) then release and test early. This allows for rapid cycles of development of both the platform and the content within the platform. To this end it was decided to target two upcoming summer schools that will contain the kinds of students that étoile aims to address:

ESSA Summer School on Agent Based Modelling, 18-22th July 2011 ASSSYT Summer School on Mathematics, Patras, 18-29th July 2011

Simple étoile pilot courses will be produced for students who attend these summer schools and members of étoile will attend the schools to get feedback from those who participated first hand.

Overall the kickoff events were highly stimulating and encouraging. The mission of étoile goes far beyond the three year project horizon - Prof. Jeff Johnson (lead partner) stated "I've always passionately believed in truly open education and in breaking down the barriers between disciplines. I believe that étoile could be the spark that helps to transition to a new kind of 21st Century education which is essentially free to all, of high quality and socially useful."

Étoile is a Coordination Action funded under the FET-Open Scheme of the European Commission.

The project website is at: http://www.etoilecascadesideas.eu/

fet11 The European Future Technologies Conference and Exhibition

4-6 May 2011 – Budapest, Hungary

he European Future Technologies Conference and Exhibition 2011 is the second installment of a new forum dedicated to frontier research in

information and communication technologies. fet11 is a unique conference on visionary, high-risk and long-term research in information science and technology. Featuring an exceptionally broad range of scientific fields the event will seed new ideas across disciplines that will reshape the future.

Keynote Speakers Josh Bongard Title: "How Evolution Shapes the Way Roboticists Think"

Abstract: Roboticists, by necessity, are keen students of biology: we hope to create machines that are as agile, adaptive and intelligent as the organisms we see around us. However, roboticists tend to copy the end products of evolution (compliant limbs, neural circuits, legged gaits) rather than evolutionary processes themselves (selection pressures, developmental programs). In this talk I will show how re-creating evolution in a computer can allow us to design robots automatically, rather than trying to build them manually.

Jean-Philippe Bouchaud Title: "The endogenous dynamics of markets: price impact and feedback loops"

Abstract: We review the evidence that the erratic dynamics of markets is to a large extent of endogenous origin, i.e. determined by the trading activity itself and not due to the rational processing of exogenous news. In order to understand why and how prices move, the joint fluctuations of order flow and liquidity – and the way these impact prices – become the key ingredients. Impact is

necessary for private information to be reflected in prices, but by the same token, random fluctuations in order flow necessarily contribute to the volatility of markets. Our thesis is that the latter contribution is in fact dominant, resulting in a decoupling between prices and fundamental values, at least on short to medium time scales. We argue that markets operate in a regime of vanishing revealed liquidity, but large latent liquidity, which would explain their hyper-sensitivity to fluctuations. More precisely, we identify a dangerous feedback loop between bid-ask spread and volatility that may lead to microliquidity crises and price jumps. We discuss several other unstable feedback loops that should be relevant to account for market crises: imitation, unwarranted quantitative models, pro-cyclical regulation, etc.

Rodney Douglas Title: "Constructive Cortical Computation"

Abstract: During the past century ever more sophisticated methods have been developed for constructing and programming computing and manufacturing machines. However, these methods are essentially forward processes that depend on intelligent human designers and programmers. They stand in stark contrast to Biology's

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methods of self-construction used to evoke the flexible information processor that is the mammalian neocortex. Understanding this radically different approach that uses algorithmic self-programming and construction could have enormous consequences for future computing and manufacturing technologies. In this talk we describe progress towards understanding these principles through detailed simulation of the development of the neocortex.

Artur Ekert Title: "Is the age of computation yet to begin?"

Abstract: The theory of classical universal computation was laid down in 1936, was implemented within a decade, became commercial within another decade, and dominated the world's economy half a century later. This success story relied on the progress in technology. As computers become faster they must become smaller. The history of computer technology has involved a sequence of changes from one type of physical realisation to another - from gears to relays to valves to transistors to integrated circuits and so on. The unavoidable step to the quantum level will be one in this sequence; but it promises something more exciting as well. For the first time since the invention of the general purpose computer, a change in underlying hardware can give computers qualitatively new functionality. Quantum theory is already important in the design of microelectronic components. Soon it will be necessary to harness quantum theory, rather than simply take it into account. I will describe our quest to understand quantum theory, our efforts to develop quantum technology to support quantum computation, and our surprise and excitement once we discovered that nature already employs coherent quantum phenomena in biological systems. There is so much potential in this fundamentally new way of harnessing nature that it appears as though the age of computation has not yet even begun!

Neelie Kroes Neelie Kroes is no stranger to ICT research and innovation, having been involved in funding such work since the early 1980s.

Biography: From February 2010 Kroes has been a Vice President of the European Commission and is leading implementation of the Digital Agenda for Europe - the EU's new comprehensive action plan to harness ICTs to drive growth and address social challenges. Kroes will be mobilising industry, national governments, other stakeholders and her colleagues to deliver on 31 pieces of legislation and 101 targets by the end of her term in 2015. At the top of the list is the EU's commitment to deliver 'broadband for all'

John Pendry Optics and metamaterials

Title: "The Science of Invisibility"

Abstract: Refractive materials give limited control of light: we can fashion lenses, and construct waveguides, but complete control is beyond simple refracting materials. Ideally we might wish to channel and direct light as we please just as we might divert the flow of a fluid. Manipulation of Maxwell!s equation shows that we can achieve just that and metamaterials open the door to this new design paradigm for optics, providing the properties required to give complete control of light. One potential application would be to steer light around a hidden region, creating a cloak of invisibility.

Gábor Prószéky Title: "The (hopefully near) future of human language technologies"

Abstract: Today!s language technology applications usually rely on either human-designed rules (used sequentially by computers) or large amount of sequential data, that is, spoken or textual corpora. Today, computer modeling of human language abilities does not use parallel methods. In current natural language processing paradigms the notion of parallelism is almost totally missing. Multi-core processors are nowadays available even in commercial computers. On the other hand, results of brain research are quite far from existing language technology applications. Applying parallelism would lead us to a more realistic architecture for language understanding, with an increased processing speed.

Claire Tomlin Title:"Mathematical models to help understand developmental biology and cancer"

Abstract: As the understanding of cellular regulatory networks grows, system dynamics and behaviors resulting from feedback effects of such systems have proven to be sufficiently complex so as to prevent intuitive understanding. Mathematical modeling in engineering and in physics or chemistry has traditionally sought to extrapolate from existing information and underlying principles to create complex descriptions of various systems, which could be analyzed or simulated, and from which further abstractions could be made. However, in studying biological systems, often only incomplete abstracted hypotheses exist to explain observed complex patterning and functions.

The challenge has become to show that enough of a network is understood to explain the behavior of the system. Mathematical modeling must simultaneously characterize the complex and nonintuitive behavior of a network, while revealing deficiencies in the model and suggesting new experimental directions. In this talk, we describe the process of modeling two biological networks: planar cell polarity in development, and treated regulatory networks in breast cancer. We demonstrate the use of the mathematical models, both in understanding the system behavior, and in suggesting new treatments.

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Reading snippets

Coevolving agent strategies and network topology for the public goods games Much of human cooperation remains an evolutionary riddle. Coevolutionary public goods games in structured populations are studied where players can change from an unproductive public goods game to a productive one, by evaluating the productivity of the public goods games.

In European Physical Journal B. http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=107

Give postdocs a career, not empty promises Consider the scientific community as an ecosystem, and it is easy to see why postdocs need another path. The system needs only one replacement per lab-head position, but over the course of a 30–40-year career, a typical biologist will train dozens of suitable candidates for the position. The academic opportunities for a mature postdoc some ten years after completing his or her PhD are few and far between.

In Nature http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=108

On Non-Bayesian Social Learning We study a model of information aggregation and social learning recently proposed by Jadbabaie, Sandroni, and Tahbaz-Salehi, in which individual agents try to learn a correct state of the world by iteratively updating their beliefs using private observations and beliefs of their neighbors. No individual agent's private signal might be informative enough to reveal the unknown state.

In arXiv http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.4395

Community Detection via Semi-Synchronous Label Propagation Algorithms A recently introduced novel community detection strategy is based on a label propagation algorithm (LPA) which uses the diffusion of information in the network to identify communities. Studies of LPAs showed that the strategy is effective in finding a good community structure.

In arXiv http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.4550

A Carbon-Cycle Based Stochastic Cellular Automata Climate Model In this article a stochastic cellular automata model is examined, which has been developed to study a "small" world, where local changes may noticeably alter global characteristics. This is applied to a climate model, where global temperature is determined by an interplay between atmospheric carbon dioxide and carbon stored by plant life. The latter can be relased by forest fires, giving rise to significant changes of global conditions within short time.

In arXiv http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.4532

Are experts born or made? A bit of both, study shows It is well known that London taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus (part of the brain involved in navigation) than other people. Similarly, professional golfers display a different brain activity pattern to novices when planning a shot.

In Cordis http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=106

Sentiment in Twitter events (…)the results give strong evidence that popular events are normally associated with increases in negative sentiment strength and some evidence that peaks of interest in events have stronger positive sentiment than the time before the peak. It seems that many positive events, such as the Oscars, are capable of generating increased negative sentiment in reaction to them.

In Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=109

Self-organized model of cascade spreading We study simultaneous price drops of real stocks and show that for high drop thresholds they follow a power-law distribution. To reproduce these collective downturns, we propose a minimal self-organized model of cascade spreading based on a probabilistic response of the system elements to stress conditions.

In arXiv http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.3114

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Conferences and workshops http://assystcomplexity.eu/conferences.jsp

Opinion Dynamics and Models of Social Influence Monday 4th April 2011 - Mathematics Institute, Zeeman Building, University of Warwick, United Kingdom. Organisers: Colm Connaughton and Yasmin Merali Web: http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=110 This one day workshop on opinion dynamics and models of social influence in networks is co-sponsored by the Mathematical Interdisciplinary Research at Warwick programme and the ASSYST project. Speakers

Antony Mayfield Living in Networks: Questions from Business and Society. Andreas Flache Comparing two theories of opinion differentiation in continuous opinion dynamics. Tobias Galla Effects of noise and confidence thresholds in nominal and metric Axelrod dynamics of social influence. Federico Vazquez The dynamics of group formation in adaptive social networks. Duncan Robertson Collaborative Network Dynamics and the Rise of Academic Fields: The Case of Strategic Management. Anthony Woolcock Linked and Weighted Opinions: Extensions to the Axelrod Model. Alistair Tucker Retweet Waves: Contagion in a Social Network.

PhD 'Research in Progress' Workshop (III) Wednesday 14th September 2011 – European Conference on Complex Systems 2011, Vienna, Austria Organisers: David M.S. Rodrigues, Larisa Mihoreanu, and Iain Kusel Web: http://cssociety.org/PhDVienna2011 The premise of the satellite meeting is to give MSc and PhD students studying within the domain of complex systems science a platform to present their research question, approach and results at an early point in their research career to an interdisciplinary and supportive group. This year's topic: FROM LAB TO SOCIETY, is meant to challenge the future young researchers to try elucidating how their own research will affect society as a whole within 5-10 years and how their complex systems approach may help structure our society for the better.

SKIN2011 Simulating Knowledge Dynamics in Innovation Networks: Workshop University of Koblenz-Landau, Koblenz, Germany 31 Mar 2011 to 1 Apr 2011 ADS11 Agent-Directed Simulation Symposium Boston Marriott Long Wharf Hotel; Boston, MA, USA 4 Apr 2011 to 9 Apr 2011 AISB11 Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour Convention University of York, UK 4 Apr 2011 to 7 Apr 2011 ISAmI 2011 2nd International Symposium on Ambient Intelligence - Software and Applications Salamanca, Spain 6 Apr 2011 to 8 Apr 2011 PAAMS11 9th International Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems

Salamanca, Spain 6 Apr 2011 to 8 Apr 2011 IEEE ALIFE 2011 The 2011 IEEE Symposium on Artificial Life Paris, France 11 Apr 2011 to 11 Apr 2011 NetSciCom2011 3rd International Workshop on Network Science for Communication Networks Shanghai, China 15 Apr 2011 to 15 Apr 2011 WSS 2011 The 4th International Symposium on Web Services Hammamet, Tunisia 20 Apr 2011 to 21 Apr 2011 AAMAS 2011 The Tenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems Taipei, Taiwan 2 May 2011 to 5 May 2011 ATES2011

2nd International Workshop on Agent Technologies for Energy Systems Taipei, Taiwan 2 May 2011 to 2 May 2011 AMPLE2011 1st International Workshop on Agent-based Modeling for Policy Engineering Colocated with AAMAS2011, Taipei, Taiwan 2 May 2011 to 6 May 2011 MABS11 12th International Workshop on Multi-Agent-Based Simulation Colocated with AAMAS 2011, Taipei, Tawian 2 May 2011 to 6 May 2011 FET11 The European Future Technologies Conference and Exhibition 2011 Budapest, Hungary 4 May 2011 to 6 May 2011 NIDISC2011 14th International Workshop on Nature Inspired Distributed Computing Anchorage (Alaska) USA 16 May 2011 to 20 May 2011

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ECMS2011 25th EUROPEAN Conference on Modelling and Simulation Krakow, Poland 7 Jun 2011 to 10 Jun 2011 ISIE2011 6th International Conference on Industrial Ecology Berkeley, California, USA 7 Jun 2011 to 10 Jun 2011 CASOS 2011 CASOS 2011 Summer Institute Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA USA 13 Jun 2011 to 19 Jun 2011 ICANN2011 International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks Espoo, Finland 14 Jun 2011 to 17 Jun 2011 PNCW11 4th Annual Political Networks Conference and Workshops Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA 14 Jun 2011 to 18 Jun 2011 ACM WebSci 11 3rd International Conference on Web Science Koblenz, Germanay 14 Jun 2011 to 17 Jun 2011 COLLA2011 The First International Conference on Advanced Collaborative Networks, Systems and Applications Luxemburg 19 Jun 2011 to 24 Jun 2011 CCSS2011 International Workshop on Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems - 2011 ETH Zurich, Switzerland 20 Jun 2011 to 25 Jun 2011 ESHIA-WEHIA2011 The 16th Annual Workshop on Economic Heterogeneous Interacting Agents Ancona, Italy

23 Jun 2011 to 25 Jun 2011 SiCoSSys 2011 Simulation of Complex Social Systems (SiCoSSys 2011) Colocated with SCSC11 The Hague, Netherlands 27 Jun 2011 to 30 Jun 2011 ECoMASS-2011 5th Workshop on Evolutionary Computation and Multi-Agent Systems and Simulation Workshop (ECoMASS-2011) Dublin, Ireland 12 Jul 2011 to 13 Jul 2011 Computational Social Science: Text and Decisions Computational Social Science: Text and Decisions Catania University, Italy 16 Jul 2011 to 23 Jul 2011 CLIMA XII 12th International Workshop on Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems Barcelona, Spain 17 Jul 2011 to 18 Jul 2011 ASONAM2011 The International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining Kaohsiung City, Taiwan 25 Jul 2011 to 27 Jul 2011 WISHWell 2011 3rd International Workshop on Intelligent Environments - Supporting Healthcare and Well-being (WISHWell!11) Nottingham, UK 25 Jul 2011 to 26 Jul 2011 Game Theory and Society 2011 Game Theory and Society - Models of Social Interaction in Sociological Research ETH Zurich, Switzerland 27 Jul 2011 to 30 Jul 2011 ICEC 2011 Workshop on Robustness and Reliability of Electronic Marketplaces

Liverpool, UK 2 Aug 2011 to 2 Aug 2011 ECAL11 European Conference on Artificial Life - 20th Anniversary Edition - Back to the Origins of Alife Paris, France 8 Aug 2011 to 12 Aug 2011 WIIAT2011 The 2011 IEEE / WIC / ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology Campus Scientifique de la Doua, Lyon, France 22 Aug 2011 to 27 Aug 2011 IEEE ICDL-EPIROB 2011 IEEE CONFERENCE ON DEVELOPMENT AND LEARNING, AND EPIGENETIC ROBOTICS Frankfurt, Germany 24 Aug 2011 to 27 Aug 2011 SPSD2011 International Community on Spatial Planning and Sustainable Development Kanazawa, Japan 29 Aug 2011 to 31 Aug 2011 ECCS11 European Conference on Complex Systems 2011 Vienna, Austria 12 Sep 2011 to 16 Sep 2011 ICMC2011 2nd International Conference on Morphological Computation ECLT, Venice, Italy 12 Sep 2011 to 14 Sep 2011 ANT2011 2nd International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies Ontario, Canada 19 Sep 2011 to 21 Sep 2011 ICORE2011 2nd International Conference on Reputation Montpellier, France 19 Sep 2011 to 19 Sep 2011

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Jobs

http://jobs.cssociety.org Professor Associate/Full Professor in Management Science IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca Italy - 02 of Mar. 2011

Teaching/Research Assistant Professeur / Chercheur : Informatique et applications de l!Informatique aux sciences humaines et sociales Département de Mathématiques et d!Informatique appliquées aux Sciences de l!Homme (actuellement 6 MCF et 2 Pr) de l!Institut des Sciences Humaines Appliquées (ISHA) France – April 30, 2011 PhD PhD position in Physics of Collective Animal Behavior Université Paul Sabatier ToulouseFrance – May 31, 2011 Teaching/Research Assistant Maitre de conférences / Chaire mixte CNRS, Modélisation des risques en société UMR 6266 IDEES (équipe MTG), Université de Rouen, Dept. de Géographie France – June 21, 2011

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Jane Bromley, Jeff Johnson, David Hales, Jorge Louçã, David MS Rodrigues

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If you are a Complex System researcher/practitioner and want to share a success story about your work / research please submit it to newsletter@assystcomplexity.eu.

The story should approximately 500 words (if you want to submit an extended story please contact us) and should be sent in TXT, ODT, RTF or DOC file formats.

Contacts

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The ASSYST project acknowledges the financial support of the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) programme within the ICT theme of the Seventh Framework Programme for Research of the European Commission.

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