ASSYST Complexity October Newsletter

Number 23, October 2011 | www.assystcomplexity.eu | www.cssociety.org

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Group Photo at ECCS!11 [Photo by Claudia Sinatra]

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Reporting the ECCS’11 Satellite Meetings

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elcome to the October 2011 edition of the ASSYST/CSS newsletter. After our community annual meeting, this year at the ECCS!11 held in Vienna (http://eccs2011.eu), a very successful conference with almost 700 (!) participants, we report the discussions occurred in the many different ECCS!11 Satellite Meetings. In this number you will find the conclusions of “EPNACS - - Emergent Properties in Natural and Artificial Complex Systems”, “Social Energy: a useful concept for analyzing complex social systems?”, “Policy Modelling”, “Urban social dynamics: segregation and criminality”, “Frontiers in the Theory of Evolution”, and “XNet - Complexity & Networks”. But this is not all.

Other very interesting ECCS!11 Satellite Meetings will be reported on the next issue of the newsletter, so stay attentive! For now we also present the essential “Reading snippets”, forthcoming conferences and workshops, jobs and other information regarding the complex systems research. Enjoy!

-- The ASSYST Team

EPNACS - Emergent Properties in Natural and Artificial Complex Systems

by Arnaud Banos

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he aim of this 4th event from EPNACS series (http://litis.univ-lehavre.fr/~bertelle/epnacs2011/), organised as a satellite meeting of ECCS 2011, was to study emergent properties arising in natural and artificial dynamic networks. The meeting was concerned with multidisciplinary approaches aimed at exploring, visualizing, modeling and simulating large scale dynamic networks, in order to detect their emergent communities, to analyse self-organizing processes and to characterize their evolution. Linking the morpho-dynamics of complex networks with the dynamic processes they convey was, for example, one of the target questions this meeting addressed. Another key issue concerned the identification of general properties of these dynamic complex networks in various natural and artificial systems (urban networks, ecosystems, neuronal networks, etc).

This satellite meeting was composed of 4 sessions plus a tutorial. The first session was dedicated to dynamical systems and chaos, the second one to dynamic networks and graphs, while the third session focused on social systems and the fourth one on specific methods to analyse complex systems. Finally, the tutorial introduced GraphStream, a Java Library for Dynamical Complex Networks designed and maintained in Le Havre University (http://graphstream-project.org/). Full proceedings of this EPNACS conference are available from http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=136

Policy Modelling

by Petra Ahrweiler

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his satellite workshop was about policy modelling with a focus on innovation policy. Policy modelling means to identify areas, which need intervention, to specify the desired state of the target system, to find the regulating mechanisms, policy formation and implementation, and to control and evaluate the robustness of interventions. The methodological difficulty hereby is to bridge the gap between policy practice often expressed in qualitative and narrative terms and the scientific realm of formal models. Furthermore, policymaking in complex social systems is no clear-cut

cause-effect process but characterised by contingency and uncertainty. To take into account technological, social, economic, political, cultural, ecological and other relevant parameters, policy modelling has to be enhanced and supported by new ICT-oriented research initiatives.

Reviewing the current state-of-the-art of policy context analysis such as forecasting, foresight, backcasting, impact assessment, scenarios, early warning systems, and technology roadmapping, the need for policy intelligence dealing with complexity becomes more and more obvious.

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Both days were opened by invited keynote speakers. On the first day, John Casti, showed in his keynote “Computational modelling and the complexity of policy” how what he termed complexity overload acts as the root cause of extreme events in all social environments, how social mood theory and agent-based modelling can help us develop tools to anticipate such events, and how this approach worked in case studies for the Finnish and Scottish policy sponsors within the Game Changers project of the IIASA Xevents activity. This opened the floor for a day on the relation of complexity-based policy domains and ICT. We had presentations reporting concrete experiences with computational requirements and tools for policy modelling (Jose" Javier Alba Sa"nchez, Luca Minghini and Gianluca Misuraca), and more exploratory studies about the possibility to create a general computational framework which uses evidencebased policy making to encapsulate socio-economic principles for creating enduring institutions for smart infrastructure management (Jeremy Pitt). Existing simulation models of technological evolution, knowledge dynamics and the emergence of innovation networks were introduced and discussed for validation potential to be relevant or stakeholders (Christopher Watts). There has been methodological progress in interpreting models! processes and results, but relevance is still largely theoretical and reliability of validation procedures is incipient (Pablo Lucas). Case studies using specific models for innovation policy modelling were then presented such as two studies adapting and developing the SKIN model (Simulating Knowledge Dynamics in Innovation Networks; http://cress.soc.surrey.ac.uk/SKIN/), a study for DG INFSO on ex-ante evaluation of the FP7 successor programme Horizon 2020 (Petra Ahrweiler, Michel Schilperoord, Nigel Gilbert and Andreas Pyka), and a simulation of the Vienna biotech cluster and its socioeconomic dynamics, with a special focus on the influence of public research funding on its innovation performance (Manuela Korber and Manfred Paier). To assist policymakers with simulation results (e.g. Ozge Kalkan on waste resources markets), specific attention was drawn to modelling decision making processes (Diane Payne).

In Policy Modelling there is an uneasy relationship between two different worlds: the "hard" "scientific" world of measurement, data, and analytic/computer modelling, mostly occupied by academics who see themselves as aiming for the truth behind complex socio-political systems and the "soft" world of "policy practice", where human understanding, communication and pragmatic decision making predominate, mostly occupied by pressure groups, advisers, politicians and consultants whose aim is to make acceptably good decisions. This depth of this divide seems to be due to the complexity of human socio-political phenomena. It results in a distinction between two communities who are thinking about the same problems of policy making, and makes effective combination of these approaches difficult. Those in the field have sometimes downplayed this divide, but it makes for a real and

substantial obstacle. From the "scientific" point of view the policy side can seem to deliberately ignore the complexity of the phenomena, to not care about the truth and with a tendency to look for justifications for decisions that have already been made. From the "policy" side the scientific approach can seem to be politically naive, remote, inarticulate, and useless in the sense that they almost never will give straight recommendations but rather just abstract explanation in ways that are often difficult to understand. However both sides are often motivated to try and bridge this divide, sensing that better decisions might be facilitated as a result.

The second day of the workshop focussed on the issues, ways and approaches for bridging this gap. This is timely since complexity science could be a bridging stone in this exercise, for the first time allowing the possibility of building such bridges in a well-founded manner. The papers and discussion at the workshop showed that the topics are very relevant and topical in today!s world, but still largely unresolved. Overcoming these difficulties calls for a deeper attention to human specific features, such as: immediacy, cognition, language, understanding, and interpretation, but it also showed that complexity science might be able to help and thus accommodate these features and, ultimately, to support effecting improvements in everyday policy practices. The papers presented also showed that the dramatic progress of ICT can help with this project, by facilitating the acquisition and immediate use of stakeholder narratives, allowing their “situated experiences” to directly feedback into the policy process.

Dave Snowden!s keynote presentation showed how implicit ground-level feedback techniques, by-passing the traditional slow modelling process, can be used to improve the guidance of policy by feeing the flow of information from those involved to the policy makes in a more direct manner. This was echoed in Bruce Edmonds! analogy between how the control problem in AI/robotics mirrors that of active policy formation. Sylvie Occelli pointed out that modelling might be used as both an activity as well as an artefact, that modelling could be a mediator engaging a wider selection of experts and stakeholders in the policy making process. As an activity it can aid the integration between the humanistic world of understanding, and that of the scientific world of data. As an artefact it can be an element in the policy debate alongside other means of expression. Two of the speakers: Giovanni Rabino, and also Magdalena Bielenia-Grajewska chose to examine the important role of language in the policy making process, whilst John Sutcliffe-Braithwaite argued for a metamodelling language for specifying and talking about policy and social issues. However, the debate also showed that this potential is still underexploited in current policy practice. In this respect, much further research was indicated, in particular how policy modelling might be used as a way to build different mixes of argumentative and syntactic approaches and so improve the production of policies over the long run.

Web: http://casl.ucd.ie/iru/index.php/eccs-2011-satellite

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Urban social dynamics: segregation and criminality

by Jean-Pierre Nadal

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he aim of this one-day workshop has been to bring together researchers from different backgrounds on topics of major interest for the analysis and understanding of urban economics and social dynamics.

Empirical as well as theoretical approaches (mathematical models and agent-based approaches) have been presented; methodological aspects discussed. This wide diversity, both in terms of topics and methodology, has provoked lively discussions among the speakers and the participants.

allocation strategies to fight against more than one type of crime. A. Tseloni (keynote speaker), presented a joint hierarchical logit model of household burglary victimization and protection measures. Based on empirical data she concludes that the efficacy of high quality security measures strongly depends on the characteristics of the household while their introduction is strongly associated with area crime levels rather than individual household risk.

In his keynote talk, J.C. NuĂąo presented a model to study the socio-economical burden due to tax evaders, including spatial effects. There is a trade off between expenditure needed for repression and the social loss of leaving some cheaters unpunished. The spatial effects are discussed with regard to countries that share economy but A. Kirman (keynote speaker) presented a theoretical implement different policies, with a special focus on the model of the role of race and income in the housing Spanish system. P. Baudains talked about his ongoing market, showing how the formation of clusters is related to work on a model of urban violence and riots that takes into the individual utility functions. He then discussed some account the spatial environment and the purposive empirical evidence from a number of American cities. Both movement of protesters and police. He furnished theoretical and empirical results were discussed by L. interesting analyses and data on the recent events in Gauvin who studied the Paris real-estate transactions, and Great Britain. P. Cotelle (the selected junior contribution)

by L. Ozaydin on urban growth in the suburbs of Istanbul. overviewed the consequences of Katrina on urban R. A. Dodson presented a formalisation of Schelling's insecurity and crime in New Orleans. Her study is based Bounded Neighbourhood Model which allows to identify on an important and original work of data collection. The and resolve ambiguities in the original model and serves criminality session ended with a critique by F. Caccavale the exploration of various model variants. who described the expectations and puzzles of a traditional criminologist on the complex systems The topic of criminality included empirical and approaches of crime. theoretical studies of criminal activity and crime repression.

Finally the workshop touched upon computational legal studies: R. Espinosa presented a game theoretical R. Waldeck introduced an application of the Nash approach to explain cyclical variations that exist in bargaining equilibrium to the modeling of criminal behavior American and England legal systems, where the integrating both cognitive and emotional principles. With a individuals choose either to go for litigation or settlement. formulation based on partial differential equations, S. Barontini discussed a model of evolution of a population in Organizers: Mirta B. Gordon (LIG, Grenoble); Jeanwhich age and social structure are taken into account, with Pierre Nadal (CAMS, EHESS & LPS, ENS Paris; a special emphasis on the link between crime and poverty. Andromachi Tseloni (Nottingham Trent University); M.B. Gordon tackled the question of the overAnnick Vignes (ERMES, Univ. PanthĂŠon representation of stigmatized minorities in crime. Based Sorbonnes/Paris II). on the analysis of empirical data concerning French juvenile offenders, she shows that when one compares Support: This event was part of the project "DyXi" populations of similar age and socioeconomic level, there supported by the Program SYSCOMM of the French is no evidence of such over-representation. C. Bruni National Research Agency, the ANR (grant ANR-08presented a game theoretical approach of crime dynamics SYSC-008). to analyze the consequences of different resource Web: http://www.lps.ens.fr/~risc/eccs2011/ The urban segregation models presented at this workshop go far beyond the original model by Schelling, and include the interplay between racial and socioeconomic factors.

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Frontiers in the Theory of Evolution

by Hildegard Meyer-Ortmanns

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prototype of complex systems in the theory of evolution is the living cell. Asked by the audience whether THE cell will be fully understood in the near future, the answer of one of the speakers was a clear NO: To describe the cell in all its many facets at the same time and in a natural environment is scientifically not accessible, neither currently nor in the near future.

Instead, the art in the game is to break down the complexity and focus on well defined aspects which allow a scientific approach. In our satellite we had versatile examples for such successful analyses: an explanation of biodiversity of cells and the evolution of their cooperation in the framework of evolutionary game theory, reproduced in experiments of microbiology under well controlled conditions in vitro. Also progress in a detailed understanding of self-organization within the cell from simple cytoskeletal elements, or microtubule reorganization driving cellular morphogenesis has been achieved.

Zooming into the molecular level, the mapping between sequence space, structure, and function was reported, in particular it was addressed which evolutionary mechanisms determine the architecture of metabolic networks. Based on a model of algebraic chemistry, metabolism can be selected along with a genetic system that expresses the catalysts and provides a map from sequence and structure of the catalysts to their function within the metabolic network.

At the core of basic mechanisms of evolution is selection.

The influence of selection was analyzed on the level of RNA secondary structure, with complex dynamical behavior of quasispecies on neutral networks. On a more abstract level it was shown how radical changes are induced in the ancestor tree if a simple selection scheme

is at work. Meanwhile many parallels in the organization of cells, societies and cultural evolution are known. So selection mechanisms are also needed to explain the observed trajectories of change in sociohistorical linguistics, as we learned from a contribution on cultural evolution.

After all, one may wonder about the status of nowadays attempts to produce protocells in the framework of artificial life, to produce these cells from â&#x20AC;&#x153;scratchâ&#x20AC;?, that is, from non-living ingredients. We heard about an attempt to reconstruct the events that initiate bacterial division in the test tube, since the very process of cell division is at the core of living cells. In a different approach, protocells were designed as thermodynamic "engines", driving a metabolism which allows the acquisition of information.

Subsystems of the overall engine are working both in silico and in vitro, but a functioning composition of these building blocks still remains a challenge for future work.

Even if researchers would soon succeed in constructing fully functioning protocells, such cells would correspond to an early stage of evolution, being no serious competitors of our cells, the truly complex units we are made of.

The program of our satellite and speakers with abstracts of their talks can be found under http://www.jacobs-university.de/ses/frontiersofevolution As reference we refer to [1] Principles of Evolution: From the Planck Epoch to Complex Multicellular Life, eds. H. Meyer-Ortmanns and S. Thurner, Frontiers Collection (Springer, Heidelberg, 2011).

XNet - Complexity & Networks

by Renaud Lambiotte

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he mathematical and empirical study of networks has emerged in the last decade as one of the fundamental building blocks in the wider study of complex systems. A network viewpoint emphasizes that the behaviour of a complex system is shaped by the interactions among its constituents and offers the possibility to analyze systems of a very different nature within a unifying mathematical framework. Complex networks theory gives the means to identify generic organization principles across social, biological and

technological systems and provides key mathematical tools for cross-disciplinary research.

The purpose of the meeting was to bring together researchers and practitioners working on complex networks and related areas, with a healthy mix of established and well-reputed, as well as high-aiming young scientists in the field. We

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especially intended to emphasize the deep connections between networks and complex systems, and to promote "hot topics", including time-varying graphs, interplay between structure and dynamics on networks, spatial and geo-tagged networks, characterisation of coupled and multiplex networks, game-theoretical framework, connections with information theory, etc. The audience was very diverse, with participants coming from Physics, Psychology, Applied Mathematics, Biology, Computer Science, Neuroscience and Economy, and the talks covered a broad range of topics, e.g. word association networks, human brain networks, trade networks, online

social networks, etc., as a sign of the multi-disciplinary nature of the field.

Our aim was also to attract participants of ECCS who might not be familiar with network theory. To achieve this goal, an introductory course on networks was organized during the morning of the first day, in order to provide the keys to understand what complex network theory has achieved so far, what the current challenges are, and what it can bring to complex systems science.

Web: http://www.eccs2011.eu/satellites/xnet/

Social Energy: a useful concept for analyzing complex social systems?

by Sarah Wolf

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n climate economics, a shift of society from the current equilibrium to another one can provide an important win-win opportunity for climate and the economy: green growth. The picture of a double-well potential function, used to illustrate such a shift, has triggered a discussion about a social energy concept, as a metaphor in analogy to energy in physics, among a group of people from the GSDP network (Global Systems Dynamics and Policy). To further the discussion of whether and how this could be a useful tool to study complex socio-ecological systems, a GSDP workshop was organized at ECCS'11 (see http://www.gsdp.eu/nc/workshops/?event=36). It provided new inputs by scheduling a broad spectrum of presentations: from a conceptual overview to cartoon models inspired by physics, from ``potential landscapes'' that describe social behaviour of animals to an agentbased model to study barriers to sustainable energy production.

From the presentations one could learn • that while it is desirable to have one energy concept which is easy to communicate, and allows for measurement and for the application of rigorous mathematical or computational tools, there are various energy concepts in the social sciences, for example, the social energy that is created in people's face-toface meetings,

• that very simple models inspired at models from physics can reproduce and illustrate social phenomena (such as the tragedy of the commons), thus giving hints as to possible starting points for policy, • that potential functions can be extracted from data on animal behaviour to construct their perceptual landscape, a tool to study the social behaviour of the animal population and possibly the energy in their system, • that social network effects may be far more important in energy demand than the price, so that efficiency improvements may ``rebound'' to a larger energy consumption, giving hints as to where possible policy problems might exist, • and many more things.

The discussions considered several aspects of social energy concepts. Just to mention one, potential functions and the fact that some systems cannot be represented by a potential function were considered -- here the question what exactly could be a ``social energy'' in the potential landscape model or in a potential game (in game theory) has yet to be answered. We are looking forward to continuing the discussion, possibly also with YOU, on the GSDP blog (http://www.gsdp.eu/conversation/discussion/2010/11/09/s ocial-energy/?post=588) or in further workshops.

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

Environment Conference 2011 SCIENCE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT - environment for society Denmark (Aarhus) 5 Oct 2011 to 6 Oct 2011

NaBIC2011 Third World Congress on Nature and Biologically Inspired Computing Salamanca University, Spain 19 Oct 2011 to 21 Oct 2011

EUMAS 2011 European Workshop on Multi-agent Systems Mastricht, Netherlands 14 Nov 2011 to 15 Nov 2011

SocInfo2011 The Third International Conference on Social Informatics Singapore 6 Oct 2011 to 8 Oct 2011

NICSO 2011 Nature Inspired Cooperative Strategies for Optimization Cluj Napoca, Romania 20 Oct 2011 to 22 Oct 2011

BASNA 2011 Business Application of Social Network Analysis 2011 Bangalore, India 12 Dec 2011 to 12 Dec 2011

EPIA.2011 15th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence Lisbon, Portugal 10 Oct 2011 to 13 Oct 2011

SPIM2011 2nd Workshop on Semantic Personalized Information Management: Retrieval and Recommendation Bonn, Germany 23 Oct 2011 to 24 Oct 2011

HICSSS 2012 Heron Island Complex Systems Summer School 2012 Heron Island, Australia 16 Jan 2012 to 27 Jan 2012

SSS 2011 13th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems Grenoble, France 10 Oct 2011 to 12 Oct 2011 LAWNP-2011 XII Latin American Workshop on Nonlinear Phenomena San Luis Potosi, Mexico 10 Oct 2011 to 14 Oct 2011

SWESE2011 7th International Workshop on Semantic Web Enabled Software Engineering In collaboration with ISWC 2011, Bonn, Germany 23 Oct 2011 to 24 Oct 2011

SIMUL 2011 The Third International Conference on Advances in System Simulation Complexity in Business Conference Barcelona, Spain 3rd Annual Complexity in Business 23 Oct 2011 to 29 Oct 2011 Conference Washington, DC IJCCI 2011 14 Oct 2011 to 14 Oct 2011 3rd International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence CloudViews2011 Paris, France "Cloud Computing & You" - 3rd Cloud 24 Oct 2011 to 26 Oct 2011 Computing International Conference Porto, Portugal CAS AAAI 2011 17 Oct 2011 to 18 Oct 2011 AAAI Fall Symposium - Complex Adaptive Systems: Energy Information BizCom2011 and Intelligence 2nd International Business Complexity Arlington, VA, USA & the Global Leader Conference 4 Nov 2011 to 6 Nov 2011 Suffolk University, Sargent Hall, 120 Tremont Street, Boston WCSCM 2011 17 Oct 2011 to 19 Oct 2011 Workshop on Complex Systems as Computing Models CASON 2011 Mexico city, Mexico Third International Conference on 9 Nov 2011 to 10 Nov 2011 Computational Aspects of Social Networks Salamanca, Spain 19 Oct 2011 to 20 Oct 2011

ICAART 2012 4th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal 6 Feb 2012 to 8 Feb 2012 ComplexNet 2012 3rd Workshop on Complex Networks Melbourne, Florida, USA 7 Mar 2012 to 9 Mar 2012 IWSOS 2012 Sixth International Workshop on SelfOrganizing Systems Delft, The Netherlands 15 Mar 2012 to 16 Mar 2012 INSC 2012 5th International Nonlinear Science Conference 2012 Barcelona, Spain 15 Mar 2012 to 17 Mar 2012 SESOC2012 4th International Workshop on Security and Online Social Networks Lugano, Switzerland 19 Mar 2012 to 19 Mar 2012 CI2012 Collective Intelligence 2012 MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA 18 Apr 2012 to 20 Apr 2012

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Contributors:

Reading Snippets

Petra Ahrweiler, Arnaud Banos, Jane Bromley, Jeff Johnson, Renaud Lambiotte, Jorge Louçã, Hildegard Meyer-Ortmanns, Jean-Pierre Nadal, David MS Rodrigues, and Sarah Wolf Photo of the ECCS!11 participants by Claudia Sinatra: http://www.eccs2011.eu

.&$%?*4:B9'44'$(*):';"2'("4C** 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.

Twitter Study Tracks When We Are :) However grumpy people are when they wake up, and whether they stumble to their feet in Madrid, Mexico City or Minnetonka, Minn., they tend to brighten by breakfast time and feel their moods taper gradually to a low in the late afternoon, before rallying again near bedtime, a large-scale study of posts on the social media site Twitter found. www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/science/30twitter.html

Speed-of-light results under scrutiny at Cern "Despite the large [statistical] significance of this measurement that you have seen and the stability of the analysis, since it has a potentially great impact on physics, this motivates the continuation of our studies in order to find still-unknown systematic effects," http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484

Bacteria Make Hydrogen Fuel From Water

Contacts 7..R.F*8*7=&'$(*<$%*&+"*.='"(="*$<* =$9#2">*.R4&"94*1(;*.$='122?* '(&"22')"(&*'=F* Web: http://assystcomplexity.eu RSS: http://assystcomplexity.eu/rss.xml Twitter: http://twitter.com/assystcomplex FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/assystcomplex Email: newsletter@assystcomplexity.eu Feedback: http://assystcomplexity.ideascale.com/

-..*S*-$9#2">*.?4&"94*.$='"&?* Web: http://cssociety.org RSS: http://cssociety.org/tiki-calendars_rss.php Suggestions: http://cssociety.org/suggestions 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.

Most of the renewable energy sources that are under consideration involve an obvious source of energy — light, heat, or motion. But this is the second time this year there has been a paper that has focused on a less obvious source: the potential difference between fresh river water and the salty oceans it flows into. But this paper doesn!t simply use the difference to produce some electricity; instead, it adds bacteria to the process and takes out a portable fuel: hydrogen. www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/09/bacteria-water-hydrogenfuel/

Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die, and Life Gets Faster “The great thing about cities, the thing that is amazing about cities is as they grow, so to speak, their dimensionality increases. That is, the space of opportunity, the space of functions, the space of jobs just continually increases. And the data shows that. If you look at job categories, it continually increases. I'll use the word "dimensionality." It opens up. And in fact, one of the great things about cities is that it supports crazy people. You walk down Fifth Avenue, you see crazy people.

There are always crazy people. Well, that's good. Cities are tolerant of extraordinary diversity. ...”

In Edge: http://edge.org/conversation/geoffrey-west

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