ASSYST CSS Newsletter number 24 by ASSYST

Number 24, November 2011 | www.assystcomplexity.eu | www.cssociety.org

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any of the recent meetings concerned the search for an answer to the tumultuous times we are living in the old continent.

This was the case of the meeting launching the "SocialEconomic Innovation FuturICT Hub for the Black Sea and Danube Area", presented in our pages. It was also the case of several ECCS'11 Satellite Meetings, including "NESS - 21st Century Social Science", "Complexity and the Future of Transportation Systems", "Dynamics On And Of Complex Networks V", the "Complexity-NET and COSI-ICT session" and finally the "PhD "Research in Progress! Workshop III". All this and much more in our November Newsletter. Enjoy! -- The ASSYST Team

Building Networks at ECCS!11

Visualizing Information in Complex Environments Joint ASSYT – FuturICT Meeting Torino, 17-18 November 2011

he dramatic progress in ICT and Internet-based applications has meant that individuals and organizations are exposed to an ever-increasing stream of data. In such an environment, the burden caused by information overload and processing is largely compensated for by the extraordinary potential which the availability of plentiful distributed data unleash for the management of complex environments.

Information visualization tools provide a creative way to address the issues. They offer a means to deal with a large amount of data and make sense of the emerging information. They also yield new capabilities to amplify cognition. By making it easier to exchange and share

information they are artefacts for social affordance, as they enhance in novel ways the environment!s properties permitting social action. This meeting is an opportunity to get insights into the possibilities offered by visualization and into the benefits likely to be accrued to the various societal organizations as they use these new tools. Contributions are gathered around three main headings which exemplify some of the roles information visualization can play in this respect and notably: decision making in complex environments, exploration of large data-base and communication. The meeting is a joint event by ASSYST and FuturICT, in collaboration with IRES (Institute for Economic and Social Research of the Piedmont Region), ISI Foundation, CSIPiemonte, DUPT (Department of Urban and Regional Planning of the University of Florence), Turin Polytechnic and Faber. The event is also sponsored by University of Warwick, Open University, Regione Piemonte, National Research Council of Italy and Global System Dynamics &Policies. Web : http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=138

New collection of videos available at the ASSYST Digital Library: "ICT based policies for a Green Knowledge Society"

SSYST and the Department of Urban and Regional Planning of the University of Florence organized a conference on the “possibility to achieve a green knowledge society with the utilisation of the ICT as a mean of enhancing interaction and a distributed intelligence on the overall society”. The conference took place May 27th, 2011 at the University of Florence. The ASSYST Digital Library has the pleasure to present the videos from this meeting, including the participation of Jeff Johnson, Elisabetta Cerb, Bridget Rosewell, Isabelle This Saint-Jean, Paola Cantamessa, Marco Masi, Pietro Lio', Francesco Melcarne and a round table with other participants. Web: http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=142

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A Chance for Enhancing the Social & Economic Creativity in the Black Sea Basin and Danube Region Carmen Costea & Manuela Epure

uring some hot summer days of August 2011, in the Club of Scientists of the Romanian Academy, an old and beautiful little castle of Bucharest, it was launched the Social-Economic Innovation FuturICT Hub for the Black Sea and Danube Area, under the House of Europe, Alternative Sciences Association and Spiru Haret University coordination. Prof Steve Bishop from UCL, the management coordinator of the FuturICT flagship was the note speaker of the event. The reunion stood as a follow-up to the efforts made by the Regional Network for Social and Economic Innovation in the Black Sea Basin â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Danube area, under the presidency of H.E. Ambassador Liviu Bota, in the presence of the National Coordinator of Eu Strategy for Danube area and of the Presidency of Economic Cooperation Organization of the Black Sea within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The need of durable development as fulfilment and harmony, a better life inside a sounder society and environment (as a living entity) where people need to learn, think and consider their existence and the role of the community became the key game of the discussions. People understood and reacted positively towards the alleged benefits of these unusual tools that have reliable correspondents into the management practices, on one's life, finances or relationships. Notable representatives expressed messages/points of view, showed full support and formulated institutional assistance: Petru Luhan, Deputy (European Parliament), Nicusor Paduraru, Deputy Romanian Parliament; Acad. Ambassador Prof. Mircea Malita and Prof. Petre Prisecaru (Institute of World Economy); Prof. Eugen Scarlat and Elena Stoica from National Authority for Research within Minstry of Education and Research; other representives of a) governamental entities: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, National Agency for Romany of Romanian Government, Academic Foundation of the Black Sea, Professional Association of Training in the Local Public Administration (CINAQ), The STEINEBEIS Innovation Center (Germany), partner of MFA for EU Strategy for Danube area - Director for South-east Europe, Senior Consultant Jurgen Raizner; National Society of Radio-communications RADIOCOM; b) universities: University Politehnica of Bucharest, Spiru Haret University, c) NGOs: Alternative Sciences Association, The Green Institutute, The National Foundation of Young Managers (FNTM); The National Theater Radu Stanca (Sibiu).

approaches based on institutional and ideological needs for change. Channeled under the implementation of EU Strategy 2020 and the "Innovation Union! Plan, and the global challenges of keeping traditions as base to develop creativity, the EC Flagship representative provided room for current scientific ideas and local results, beyond the details about the action mechanisms, principal goals and stakes pertaining to the program of scientific innovation and technology under its coordination. A n outstanding male society found the strenghth to hear the females voices with regard to what our sick society may need. Similarly, Prof Steven Bishop, the FuturICT coordinator, carried out a dialogue with the shareholders having presented the suggested innovation projects, mainly targeting the Danube area, the Black Sea Basin, which intends to promote in the near future, including by the latest means of financial support of the European Commission.

The overall atmosphere of the launching reunion increased the hope in gender contribution and innovation ability that the Romanian researchers have, in cooperation with their European counterparts. The conclusion was as one â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the development of a hybrid world is emergent, thrives on mutations that arise in the gap between past & future, between crises in education & culture, between genders and their capabilities and responsibilities. Therefore it is the high time to design a smart education, focused on the freedom of being sustainable responsible & systems thinking to counter crisis even inside the boom. This is the single way to serve the future as knowledge and innovation will remain the key drivers for sustainable growth and prosperity of each country whether their roots can be extracted from the traditions forgotten. Therefore extensive complex research is required to demonstrate the development benefits significantly from adding gender contribution and family and food culture as critical success factors.

During the presentations or table debates people outlined the need to reconsider the smart values and economic

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Complexity-NET and COSI-ICT session at ECCS’11 By Jane Bromley

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ne of the satellite meetings during ECCS!11 was the Complexity-NET and COSI-ICT session. During this session there were presentations of work in progress from projects sponsored under the Complexity-NET: Interdisciplinary Challenges for Complexity Science call and the FET proactive 4: COSIICT call. The programme for the event can be seen here http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=133 . Complexity-NET http://www.complexitynet.eu is a group of European science and technology funding agencies, research councils and ministries all working together to create an environment that best enables the coordination of strategically planned national activities in Complexity Science and Complex Systems. The strategic vision of Complexity-NET is to improve the stimulation of complexity research and innovation through a dedicated strategic plan where coordination of funding for complexity research and training in Europe is a central element. The aim of their call Interdisciplinary Challenges for Complexity Science, launched on 8 May 2009, was to support collaborative, interdisciplinary research projects on approaches with the potential to bring new insight to important problems in real-world complex systems. Proposals had to address clearly at least one of three broad, complexity-related themes: • • •

Emergence and self-organisation, individual to collective behaviour, micro to macro; Dynamics and (un)predictability, risk and extreme events; Resilience, sustainability, management and control of complex systems.

Speakers for projects sponsored under the ComplexityNET call were: •

• • • • • •

Dr Carolina Cronemberger, Multi-objective optimization for modeling developmental gene regulatory networks (MOPDEV) Dr Anders Johansson, Complexity in Spatial Dynamics (COSMIC) Dr Sabine Lennartz, Localizing signatures of catastrophic failure – LOCAT Prof. Rosaria Conte, Simulating the EMergent Impact of Regulations Across cultures (SEMIRA) Dr Alef Sterk, Predictability of Extreme Weather Events (PREDEX) Karthika Raghavan, Applying Computational Epigenetic Micromodel to predict Colon Cancer Prof. Tassos Bountis, Advances in Complex Matter Research

• •

! Dr Joachim de Beule, Emergence and Evolution of Biological Symbol Systems (EvoSym) Dr Mara Baudena, Resilience and interaction of networks in ecology and economics (RESINEE)

The COSI-ICT call is funded by FET-Proactive (http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=134), a branch of the European Commission!s ICT research funding, which focuses resources on visionary and challenging long-term goals. The COSI-ICT call (Objective ICT-2007.8.4: FET proactive 4: Science of complex systems for socially intelligent ICT http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=135) aims to produce key concepts and tools for systems in which ICT is tightly entangled with human, social and business structures. Projects funded under this initiative are: Socionical http://www.socionical.eu/, Qlectives http://www.qlectives.eu/, Epiwork http://www.epiwork.eu/ and Cyberemotions http://www.cyberemotions.eu/. Speakers for the COSI-ICT call were: • •

Prof Alessandro Vespignani, the COSI-ICT project Epiwork Prof. Dr. Janusz Ho#yst, the COSI-ICT project CyberEmotions

Because of the nature of the funding of the projects there was a diverse range of subjects covered making this a good place to get a flavour of the whole field of complexity science. Speakers ranged from well established scientists to people just starting on their research career, producing a collegiate, friendly and exciting meeting. Unfortunately, Prof Dr. Janusz Ho#yst was not available on the day, but his results will be readable in the booklet of papers that the organizers are producing following the meeting.

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PhD ‘Research in Progress’ Workshop III from LAB to SOCIETY – Opportunities in Complexity a CSS Satellite Meeting at ECCS!11, Vienna by David M.S. Rodrigues and Larisa Mihoreanu http://cssociety.org/PhDVienna2011

uring ECCS!11 held in Vienna, a 1 day satellite meeting was held to promote young researchers with the possibility to present their early work in a friendly environment. The PhD "Research in Progress! was the 3rd instalment of a satellite meeting that aims to motivate young researchers (mainly PhDs, but not limited to) to present their ideas with a view on elucidating how they affect society as a whole, and to discuss how, within 5-10 years, their complex systems approach may have helped to structure our society for the better.

A booklet of the session was produced and is available online at http://goo.gl/OZyKS. It includes the abstracts of the presentations accompanied by a message from the CSS president, Professor Jeffrey Johnson, on the prospects that lay ahead for young researchers in the field of complex systems.

The premise of this satellite meeting was to give MSc, PhD, Postdocs and any other young researcher 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 in front of an interdisciplinary and supportive group. The broader aim of the workshop was to expose beginning researchers to a wide number of research questions and methodologies within complex systems science and to allow the opportunity to network with potential colleagues. In this year!s session, 10 participants presented their work on diverse topics ranging from complex medical issues to yoga and effective emergency responses. David Hales, researcher from the Open University in the UK, was the invited keynote speaker and presented a talk on “The social transformation and your role in it”.

The feedback received from the participants was very satisfying as the majority felt the workshop very helpful for their present state of research. Next year!s European Conference on Complex Systems will be held in Brussels http://www.eccs2012.eu/ (Sept 3-7) and the CSS will certainly promote the 4th instalment of this young lab session. The session will be organised fully by young researchers, for young researchers, with the CSS support. If you would like to collaborate in organisation of next year!s session please contact the CSS. The CSS has a young researchers page at http://css.csregistry.org/YoCo where people can discuss and share their ideas and suggestions, or you can contact directly this year!s organisers at dmsrs@iscte.pt or larisa.mihoreanu@kcl.ac.uk

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Dynamics On And Of Complex Networks V A two-day Satellite Workshop of the European Conference on Complex Systems, 2011 By Animesh Mukherjee

or the past four years, the primary aim of the workshop series “Dynamics on and of Complex Networks”, being held as a satellite meeting of the European Conference on Complex Systems, has been to explore the (statistical) dynamics on and of such complex networks. Dynamics on networks refers to the different types of so called processes (e.g. proliferation, diffusion etc.) that take place on networks. The functionality/efficiency of such processes is strongly affected by the topology as well as the dynamic behavior of the network. On the other hand, Dynamics of networks mainly refer to various phenomena (for instance self-organization) that go on in order to bring about certain changes in the topology of the network. This year the focus of the workshop was on “modeling social and information dynamics through methods of complex networks”.

On the basis of the importance of the topics and the types of submissions we received, the technical programme was divided under four major categories: (i) social network analysis, (ii) information and technological networks, (iii) spreading in networks and (iv) network dynamics. There were topics applying statistical physics approaches to the analysis of various time-varying networks including transportation networks, mobile phone networks and face-to-face contact networks. In addition, there were more theoretical topics related to community identification, bipartite network analysis and epidemic spreading. To complement this set, there were a bunch of topics applying purely a computer science approach to rumour spreading in netowks, stability analysis of network algorithms and design of a global information grid. For

instance, Vincent D. Blondel from Catholic University of Louvain showed in his talk how natural decomposition of a large network constructed from communications between millions of mobile phone users in several European countries gives rise to socially cohesive groups. He further showed how the decrease with distance of connection probability between mobile phone users can be quantified and, subsequently, described a conjecture about a possible explanation for the observed decrease. Ciro Cattuto from ISI Foundation, Italy, explained in his talk how the spread of infectious diseases crucially depends on the contact patterns among individuals. In particular, he showed the results of simulting the SEIR process on a high-resolution data of the interactions between the attendees of a conference. Alessandro Panconessi from Sapienza University of Rome showed mathematically in his talk how gossip spreads as wildfire and that it all depends on an empirical property of the social network, namely the conductance. Arunabha Sen from Arizona State University discussed in his talk the issues related to the design of a man-made complex system -- the Global Information Grid (GIG), an all-encompassing communications project undertaken by the U. S. department of defense (DoD). He defined GIG as a globally interconnected, end-to-end set of information capabilities for collecting, processing, storing, disseminating, and managing information on demand to war fighters, policy makers, and support personnel. Niloy Ganguly from IIT Kharagpur discussed the interesting statistical properties of the distributions of followers in Twitter with a suitable model to explain the evolution of this web-social media. All the information regarding the workshop can be found at http://www.mpipksdresden.mpg.de/~peruani/doocn2011/. The abstract booklet can be found at http://www.mpipksdresden.mpg.de/~peruani/doocn2011/doocn_booklet_2011.pdf. We plan to edit a book volume "Dynamics On and Of Complex Networks-II : Applications to time-varying dynamical networks! compiled from some of the selected contributions from the workshop. We would also like to invite chapter submissions from interested researchers within the following major sub-areas: (a) Information & Social Dynamics, (b) Diffusion, Spreading & Epidemiological Dynamics and (c) Transportation & Mobility Dynamics. The edited volume is scheduled to be published by Birkhäuser, Springer and should serve as a sequel of "Dynamics On and Of Complex Networks: Applications to Biology, Computer Science, and the Social Sciences!, Birkhäuser, Springer, ISBN 978-0-81764750-6. Web: http://www.mpipksdresden.mpg.de/~peruani/doocn2011/

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NESS - 21st Century Social Science Satellite Meeting at the ECCS "11, 15th September 2011 By David Hales

lthough we live in the 21st century we often apply models based on assumptions from the 19th century. This is particularly evident in economics where there is still a focus on equilibrium points in, relatively simple, models composed of representative agents with perfect information and idealised rationality. Yet events around us show that equilibrium is rarely found in real social and economic systems where information and rationality is restricted or partial. To address these issues and attempt to move towards a 21st century Social Science a group of researchers organised a satellite workshop at the European Conference on Complex Systems in Vienna last month on Non-Equilibrium Social Science (NESS). The NESS workshop was a one day event comprising talks and discussions. The talks mainly focused on nonequilibrium modelling of economic phenomena such as new more realistic conceptions of rationality, social dynamics, network effects of interacting economic agents (such as banks) and the new possibilities offered by disruptive technologies. Paul Ormerod, an economist and partner at Voltera Partners, UK, presented key aspects of a new conception of "rationality" applicable to the kinds of markets and interactions we find in the 21st century economy. He emphasised the role of copying (behaviour) and networks (of influence) in contemporary economic and social systems. It is clear that human agents have always used such strategies but that these become ever more important in complex environments where agents must make choices between billions of products and services with limited time and information. Andrzej Nowak, a social psychologist and complexity specialist from Warsaw University, presented ideas from social psychology that can unpack the multiple influences among investors and advisors in financial markets. Specifically in addition to the indirect influence through price dynamics more direct influence occurs through faceto-face, phone, SMS and e-mail interactions. These can result in group-level emergent phenomena that influence price formation processes. Both theoretical models and empirical research reveal interesting insights into these processes. Mauro Gallegati, an economist from the Universita Politecnica delle Marche, Italy, presented a novel analytical model capturing agent heterogeneity, asymmetric information and endogenous network

evolution for a population of interacting firms and banks through credit relations. The aim of the approach was to neither ignore interactions between agents, nor to get hopelessly mired in complicated details by trying to model those interactions in their completeness, but to strike for some middle ground in which the consequences of interconnectedness can be at least crudely assessed. The model generates boom / bust cycles and indicates higher concentration in the banking sector makes the system more fragile. David Hales, a computer scientist from The Open University, presented an overview of on-going open source projects that attempt to denationalise (and demarketise) money through the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies similar to those developed for file-sharing. He discussed briefly Bitcoin and Ripple (P2P) systems and presented a, possibly fanciful, future scenario where group-like selection processes could lead to quality money through a decentralised currency based on a constantly changing "weighted basket" of virtual currencies - Similar to the IMF's SDR's but without any central control. Bruce Edmonds, a policy modelling specialist from Manchester Metropolitan University, presented a detailed argument against grand theories of agent rationality and more towards context dependent and simpler kinds of behaviour (or heuristics). He termed these "mundane" accounts of rationality and demonstrated how models from Artificial Intelligence and cognitive science can be used to integrate and discover them. It was noted that in many simulation models that follow this methodology equilibria are not relevant within plausible timescales. At the start of the workshop David Hales and Jeff Johnson, a complexity / design specialist and the president of the Complex Systems Society, introduced the concept of NESS and the aim to build a new and open community around core concepts and challenges. Johnson remarked: "I am excited by this new initiative which is well overdue. We are already over a decade into the 21st century and we need to play a game of catch-up. If we can bring together and focus the best people working in the NESS space from across Europe and beyond, I believe, we could see the biggest release of compressed change since the birth of the social sciences in the 19th century - a 21st century enlightenment." More details about this and future NESS events can be found at: http://www.nessnetwork.eu

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Complexity and the Future of Transportation Systems Satellite Meeting at the ECCS !11, 15th September 2011 By Massimiliano Zanin and Fabrizio Lillo

“C

omplexity and the Future of Transportation Systems” (CFTS), a one-day Satellite Meeting organized within the ECCS !11, was born with the ambitious objective of being a place where experts coming from two different fields, namely complexity science and transportation research, could gather together and exchange ideas and challenges. This Meeting was supported and partly funded by the ComplexWorld Network and the SESAR Joint Undertaking. In this sense, the Meeting offered a mix of different disciplines: from pure mathematical models of transportation systems in the morning, up to the presentation of concrete Air Traffic Management problems in the last session. Of special interest have been the presentations of the three keynote speakers: Miguel Romance gave an introduction to multi-level graphs and their use in transportation networks, Dino Pedreschi spoke about data mining of mobility and transportation data, and Vito Latora presented an overview of the structural evolution of real urban networks and its modeling. Furthermore, the last session of the afternoon witnessed the presentation of an alternative approach to complexity, that is, the aeronautical concept of complexity of the air traffic. This topic is of utmost importance, as it is directly related with the workload of air traffic controllers, and therefore with the safety of air transport. An interesting debate started around this point: specifically, about how could a Complexity Science perspective help in understanding the new complex characteristics of the future air transport system. Other contributed talks in the morning and in the early afternoon

focused their attention on urban networks, urban traffic, and the risk management of natural disaster in urban environment.

Overall, the workshop was perceived as interesting and participants seemed satisfied – in spite of being scheduled in the fourth day of the Conference and of the tiredness of all participants. Authors of the best contributions will also have the possibility of publishing a full paper in a dedicated issue of the European Physical Journal – Special Topics, which will be published in the summer of 2012. A public Call for Papers can be found at http://www.epj.org/special_issues_2.html#call5. More information can be obtained by directly contacting the organizers of the Satellite Meeting. CFTS Website: www.complexworld.eu/eccs11 ComplexWorld Network: www.complexworld.eu

CAS AAAI 2011 AAAI Fall Symposium - Complex Adaptive Systems: Energy Information and Intelligence Arlington, VA, USA 4 Nov 2011 to 6 Nov 2011

ICAART 2012 4th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal 6 Feb 2012 to 8 Feb 2012

CI2012 Collective Intelligence 2012 MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA 18 Apr 2012 to 20 Apr 2012

WCSCM 2011 Workshop on Complex Systems as Computing Models Mexico city, Mexico 9 Nov 2011 to 10 Nov 2011

ComplexNet 2012 3rd Workshop on Complex Networks Melbourne, Florida, USA 7 Mar 2012 to 9 Mar 2012

ISCRAM2012 The 9th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Vancouver, Canada 22 Apr 2012 to 25 Apr 2012

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

IWSOS 2012 Sixth International Workshop on Self-Organizing Systems Delft, The Netherlands 15 Mar 2012 to 16 Mar 2012

SDM 12 The Twelfth SIAM International Conference on Data Mining Anaheim, California, USA 26 Apr 2012 to 28 Apr 2012

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

INSC 2012 5th International Nonlinear Science Conference 2012 Barcelona, Spain 15 Mar 2012 to 17 Mar 2012

ICECCS2012 17th IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris - France 18 Jul 2012 to 20 Jul 2012

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

SESOC2012 4th International Workshop on Security and Online Social Networks Lugano, Switzerland 19 Mar 2012 to 19 Mar 2012

more conferences at www.assystcomplexity.eu

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Jobs

Contributors to this edition:

http://jobs.cssociety.org

Assistant Professor in Economics and Innovation Management IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca, Innovation Management and Economics - LIME - Research Unit Italy - Wed 30 of Nov., 2011 PhD Complex systems tools for computer aided innovative management and design in food engineering and biological systems INRA and ISCPIF France - Thu 01 of Dec., 2011 Postdoc/Lecturer Postdoctoral Research Assistant Mathematics Institute & Centre for Complexity Science, University of Warwick United Kingdom - Thu 01 of Dec., 2011

Jane Bromley, Carmen Costea, Manuela Epure, David Hales, Dirk Helbing, Jeff Johnson, Fabrizio Lillo, Jorge Louçã, Larisa Mihoreanu, Animesh Mukherjee, Sylvie Occelli, David MS Rodrigues, and Massimiliano Zanin Cover Photo by Claudia Sinatra

( )1*/3(67A-&66&*"('7&@0+&"06G(( 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.

Professor Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Complex Systems University of Alaska Anchorage United States - Sun 01 of Jan., 2012 Postdoc Post-doc Bio-economic modeling for scenarios of biodiversity and forestry facing climate change CNRS France - Sun 01 of Jan., 2012 PhD Two Marie Curie PhD positions in computational systems biology BioProcess Engineering Group Instituto de Investigaciones Marinas (C.S.I.C.) Spanish Council for Scientific Research C/Eduardo Cabello 6 36208 Vigo Spain - Thu 01 of Mar., 2012 Teaching/Research Assistant Maitre de Conférences en Physique Statistique des Systèmes Complexes CPT, Université d'Aix-Marseille France - Sun 01 of Apr., 2012 Postdoc/Lecturer Theoretical understanding of multi-scale dynamics of brain networks Italian National Institute for Nuclear Research Italy - Sat 01 of Dec., 2012

Contacts B))C)D(O(B%1&*"(:*/(1#0()%&0"%0(*:(%*-;+0<( )C610-6($"@()*%&$++3(&"10++&'0"1(&%D( 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/

.))(^(.*-;+0<()3610-6()*%&013( 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.

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Call for nominations: Young Scientist Award

Reading Snippets

Nature-inspired collective intelligence in theory and practice When the first nature-inspired computational methods have appeared a few decades ago, they were welcomed by the scientific community with a mix of curiosity and scepticism. Over the years, however, these methods have shown their value not only for computer science, but also for several areas The Young Scientist Award in Socio- and Econophycis of engineering, as we witness more and more successful (5,000 EUR) will be awarded during the annual Spring applications. As a consequence, a wide spectrum of applications and services has currently been developed and Meeting of the German Physical Society in Berlin, in designed relying on various natural biological paradigms. the week from March 25-30, 2012. The Young Scientist Award recognizes outstanding original contributions that use physical methods to develop a better understanding of socio-economic problems and is intended for scientists in the earlier stage of their career, aged 40 or less.

In Information Sciences http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=140

Candidates can be from all over the world and do not necessarily need to be physicists. The following list of previous winners reflect the rich variety of the field of socio- and econophysics:

In some respects natural selection is a quite simple theory, arrived at through the logical integration of three propositions (the presence of variation within natural populations, an absolutely limited resources base, and procreation capacities exceeding mere replacement numbers) whose individual truths can hardly be denied. Its relation to the larger subject of evolution, however, remains problematic. It is suggested here thata scaling-down of the meaning of natural selection to “the elimination of the unfit,” as originally intended by Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), might ultimately prove a more effective means of relating it to larger-scale, longer-term, evolutionary processes

- 2002: Damien Challet (minority games etc.) - 2003: Vasiliki Plerou (financial markets etc.) - 2004: Illes Farkas (crowd dynamics etc.) - 2005: Reuven Cohen (complex networks etc.) - 2006: Xavier Gabaix (Zipf's law of urban growth etc.) - 2007: Katarzyna Sznajd-Weron (opinion formation) - 2008: Frabrizio Lillo (financial crashes etc.) - 2009: Duncan Watts (small world networks, etc.) - 2010: Dirk Brockmann (epidemic spreading, etc.)

Natural selection: A concept in need of some evolution?

In Complexity - http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=139

Improved exact method for the double TSP with multiple stacks

The Double TSP with Multiple Stacks is a logistics problem where one must, using a container, transport a given number Candidates will be assessed by an international award of orders from a set of pickup customers to a set of delivery committee according to the originality of their customers at minimum cost. Each order corresponds to the contributions and their impact on the development of movement of one pallet, all pickups must be completed before the field. the first delivery, and the container cannot be repacked once packed. In this paper we improve the previously proposed Nominations can be uploaded at http://www.dpgphysik.de/gliederung/ak/aksoe/YSA/call exact method of Lusby et al. (Int Trans Oper Res 17 (2010), 637–652) through an additional preprocessing technique that .html until December 1st, 2011. uses the longest common subsequence between the respective pickup and delivery problems. The results suggest an impressive improvement, and we report, for the first time, optimal solutions to several unsolved instances from the literature containing 18 customers. Instances with 28 customers are also shown to be solvable within a few percent of optimality - 2011: Santo Fortunato (sociophysics, etc.)

In Networks - http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=141

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