ASSYST / CSS Newsletter Number 26 - January 2012 by ASSYST

Number 26, January 2012 | www.assystcomplexity.eu | www.cssociety.org

Happy New Year !

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his is the wish of the ASSYST team. And to start in a good mood, we present in this newsletter a synthesis of the reports from ECCS!11 bursaries winners. Most bursary recipients did appreciate the conference, and will probably try to attend ECCS!12 that, as you know, will be held in Brussels next September. Don!t forget that the deadline for proposing a satellite meeting for ECCS!12 is already on the 6th of January! This issue of the ASSYST/CSS newsletter proposes taking a close look to some interesting events that our community will organise during this new year: starting by the “ASSYST Workshop on Mathematics for the Dynamics of Multilevel Systems”, that will be held at the European Centre for Living Technology, Venice, 26th 28th February (see the call for participation on page 3); the “1st Annual Conference on Complexity and Human Experience”, a conference focusing on humanities and social sciences, from the 30th of May to the 1st June at The University of North Carolina; the “Heron Island Complex Systems Summer School”, at the University of Sydney, from the 16th to the 27th January; and the new research project “EveryAware - Enhance environmental awareness through social information technologies” (see description and link page 5). Finally, we call your attention to two videos recently available at the ASSYST Digital Library: “Buble Truble”, a TED presentation by Tobias Preis, and “The endogenous dynamics of markets: price impact and feedback loops” by Jean-Philippe Bouchaud. Sign of the times we are living, complex systems research is being called to help facing economic crisis. As usual, you will be able to find conference and jobs announcements, and the essential Reading Snippets. Enjoy!

Happy New Year from The ASSYST team

-- The ASSYST Team

Reports from ECCS’11 Bursaries Winners by Jane Bromley

ne of the work packages of ASSYST is for the provision of conference support and, in particular, to attempt to increase variety in the CS community by supporting female scientists and minority groups. This year we provided 32 bursaries for people to attend ECCS!11. The bursaries provided limited contributions towards the conference fee and/or travel expenses for female scientists, young researchers, and others who would otherwise be unable to attend ECCS'11. There were also a number of conditions for receiving the bursary, one of which was to provide feedback about how they had benefitted from attending the conference.

the way, but from isolated locations, and slightly under half were female. Most bursary recipients were very positive about attending the conference – they found it well organized, liked the location, and enjoyed meeting people from all over the world. They found the whole event inspiring (the most useful thing since starting their PhD as one person said) and many commented that they had never learnt so much in one week. In particular the chances to discuss their research with the community, to receive feedback and attend tutorials, were all seen as key in their future work. Many commented that they would not have been able to attend without the help from the bursary and were very grateful. Another aspect of the conference that was appreciated was its interdisciplinary nature and the chance to see the state of the art in the whole field. Many were very happy to have had the opportunity to meet relevant personalities in their field, to attend a lecture by a Nobel Prize winner, and in general the opportunity to learn from leading scientists in the field. Many mentioned the Young Researcher Network supported by FuturICT as very beneficial. They made friends and developed future cooperation. Some used the time to network and look for post-doctoral positions. The negatives were restricted to things like finding the parallel sessions meant they couldn!t attend all they wanted or wishing to hear talks about Complex Systems from a philosophical point of view.

You can read the full reports at http://www.assystcomplexity.eu/news.jsp?article=82 The bursaries were given to people from all over the world: from Europe, which was well represented, to North Africa, the Philippines, Iran, Russia, Ukraine, India and South America. This shows how international the conference has become in the eight years of its existence. Those supported ranged from young people just starting in their research career, to others well along

Some had found the review process frustrating and didn!t like the use of just short abstracts for selecting contributions. Finally someone noted the need for a cross-disciplinary education for Complex Systems scientists – which Etoile is seeking to address. web: http://www.assystcomplexity.eu/

ECCS’12 - Call for organizing satellite meetings ECCS'12 will be a major international event in the area of complex systems and related topics. It will offer unique opportunities to present novel scientific approaches and to review potential applications. Two days of the conference, 5 and 6 September, are reserved for satellite meetings. Applications to organize a satellite meeting can now be submitted via email. Prospective organizers are invited to submit an informal proposal (less than 1000 words) by email to info@eccs2012.eu with subject line 'Satellite proposal'. In the message header, please specify the satellite title, as well as the names and institutions of the members of the organizing committee. The deadline for applications for satellite meetings is January 6 2012. Official notification of acceptance will be sent on 4 February 2012 at the latest.

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Call for Participation

ASSYST Workshop on Mathematics for the Dynamics of Multilevel Systems European Centre for Living Technology, Venice, 26th - 28th February 2012

ollowing highly successful meetings on Mathematics in the Science of Complex Systems at ECLT in Venice and Warwick University in February and June 2011, we are holding the meeting Mathematics for the Dynamics of Multilevel Systems in February 2012. This meeting takes place in the context of the recent DYM-CS call from FET (http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/fet-proactive/dymcs_en.html). That call closes in January 2012. Our meeting will give an opportunity for those who have participated in this call to share their ideas before the evaluations, and it aims to create a collaborative context for the projects which are selected for funding. There is no conference fee and accommodation, meals and some travel support will be provided. Attendance is strictly limited. Anyone wishing to attend this meeting should contact j.m.bromley@open.ac.uk saying briefly their interest in the meaning and why they should be allocated a place. Places will be allocated on the basis of engagement with the DYM-CS programme and/or individuals having a clear contribution to make to the DYM-CS community. We expect to be oversubscribed and apologise in advance that we cannot accept everyone on this occasion.

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1st Annual Conference on Complexity and Human Experience May 30th - June 1st, 2012 The University of North Carolina

he recent increase in the number of formal institutes and conferences dedicated to complexity theory and its application is evidence that complexity science has arrived and is realizing its potential to cut across almost every academic discipline. Research projects centered on complex adaptive systems in the natural (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) and social sciences (economics, political science, anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc.), along with novel applications in engineering, computer science, robotics, and, more recently, the arts and the humanities (archaeology, art history, history, literature, philosophy, performance art, religion, etc.), have already earned some recognition in the field of complexity science. In light of these developments, the Complex Systems Institute and the Center for Advanced Research in the Humanities at UNC Charlotte will inaugurate an annual conference series, beginning in 2012, dedicated to complexity with particular application to understanding the intricacies of human experience across all domains. The goal of the series is to provide a trans-disciplinary venue for scholars from the humanities and the social sciences, as well as some aspects of the natural sciences (such as neuroscience, pharmacology, etc.). Since matters of life and death pertain to human experience in profound and important ways, the conference hopes to attract representatives from the allied health sciences as well. Web: http://sites.google.com/site/humancomplexity2012/

Heron Island Complex Systems Summer School 2012 January 16 to 27, 2012

usiness is arguably the human enterprise that drives our use (and abuse) of natural resources more than any other activity. Business and the biosphere are therefore two complex systems intricately linked. Achieving global sustainability thus requires understanding the complex structure and dynamics of "coupled business and biological systems" and particularly developing tools to analyse their interconnectivity across multiple scales of space, time and organisation... This leads us away from disciplinary models of isolated systems to the development of integrated regional models right up to modelling the whole earth system. Our summer school will explore new advances and techniques that can be applied to model coupled business and biological systems from local to global scales. Web: http://sydney.edu.au/business/research/complexity/events/heron_island_summer_school_2012

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EveryAware - Enhance environmental awareness through social information technologies Project coordinated by Fondazione Istituto per l'Interscambio Scientifico, Italy 7th Framework programme – STREP 2011 - 2014

here is now overwhelming evidence that the current organisation of our economies and societies is seriously damaging biological ecosystems and human living conditions in the very short term, with potentially catastrophic effects in the long term. The enforcement of novel policies may be triggered by a grassroot approach, with a key contribution from information and communication technologies (ICT). Nowadays low-cost sensing technologies allow the citizens to directly assess the state of the environment; social networking tools allow effective data and opinion collection and real-time information spreading processes. In addition, theoretical and modeling tools developed by physicists, computer scientists and sociologists have reached the maturity to analyse, interpret and visualize complex data sets. The proposed project intends to integrate all crucial phases (environmental monitoring, awareness enhancement, behavioural change) in the management of the environment in a unified framework, by creating a new technological platform combining sensing technologies, networking applications and data-processing tools; the Internet and the existing mobile communication networks will provide the infrastructure hosting such a platform, allowing its replication in different times and places. Case studies concerning different numbers of participants will test the scalability of the platform, aiming at involving as many citizens as possible leveraging on the low cost and high usability of the sensing devices. The integration of participatory sensing with the monitoring of subjective opinions is novel and crucial, as it exposes the mechanisms by which the local perception of an environmental issue, corroborated by quantitative data, evolves into socially-shared opinions, eventually driving behavioural changes. Enabling this level of transparency critically allows an effective communication of desirable environmental strategies to the general public and to institutional agencies. Web: http://www.everyaware.eu/

Conferences http://www.assystcomplexity.eu/conferences.jsp HICSSS 2012 Heron Island Complex Systems Summer School 2012 Heron Island, Australia 16 Jan 2012 to 27 Jan 2012

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

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

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

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

Evostar 2012 Evostar 2012 University of Málaga 11 Apr 2012 to 13 Apr 2012

IWSOS 2012 Sixth International Workshop on SelfOrganizing Systems Delft, The Netherlands 15 Mar 2012 to 16 Mar 2012

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

ISCRAM2012 The 9th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Vancouver, Canada 22 Apr 2012 to 25 Apr 2012 SDM 12 The Twelfth SIAM International Conference on Data Mining Anaheim, California, USA 26 Apr 2012 to 28 Apr 2012 ICECCS2012 17th IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris - France 18 Jul 2012 to 20 Jul 2012 ECCS12 European Conference on Complex Systems 2012 Université Libre de Bruxelles 3 Sep 2012 to 7 Sep 2012

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ASSYST Video Library

The dynamics of markets http://www.assystcomplexity.eu/video.jsp?collection=The%20dynamics%20of%20markets

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Bubble Trouble

The endogenous dynamics of markets: price impact and feedback loops

! When a stock market rises unsustainably, it can create a financial bubble that sooner or later will burst. Tobias Preis explains whether concepts from physics can be used to create a law describing exactly how such crashes occur. Tobias Preis is a scientist and founder of Artemis Capital Asset Management. He performed complex systems research at Boston University and ETH Zurich. He was awarded a Ph.D. in physics and is a member of the Gutenberg Academy. His current research focuses on quantifying and modeling financial market fluctuations. Recently, he headed a research team which provided evidence that search engine query data and stock market fluctuations are correlated. Web: tobiaspreis.de Twitter: @t_preis

! “The endogenous dynamics of markets: price impact and feedback loops” was presented by Jean-Philippe Bouchaud (Capital Fund Management, ESPCI Paris Tech, Ecole Polytechnique) at FET!11 - The European Future Technologies Conference and Exhibition - Science beyond fiction, a conference held in Budapest, May 4 – 6, 2011. The presentation is available at the FET!11 website. 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 keyingredients. 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.”

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Jobs http://jobs.cssociety.org

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 modelling for scenarios of biodiversity and forestry facing climate change CNRS France - Sun 01 of Jan., 2012 Postodc/Lecturer Postdoc and Doctoral Scholarship at the Leo Apostel Center for Interdisciplinary Studies Leo Apostel Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies Brussels Free University Belgium - Sat 07 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 UCD Research Fellow (2 yrs)

Contributors to this edition: Jane Bromley, Jeff Johnson, Jorge Louçã, and David MS Rodrigues.

5/.*%!08R29009.;!?89K'>9;'0U!! 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 A55)5B!=!AF/9.;!1.*!/D'!5F9';F'!.1!F.2$>'J! 5)0/'20!#;K!5.F9#>>%!9;/'>>9?';/!9FB! 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/

455!V!4.2$>'J!5%0/'20!5.F9'/%! 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.

Prof. Dr. Petra Ahrweiler Innovation Research Unit – UCD Dublin http://casl.ucd.ie/iru/ University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland

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Reading Snippets First 'Earth-Size Planets Beyond Our Solar System' Discovered

The network takeover

Scientists have found two Earth-sized planets orbiting a star outside the solar system, an encouraging sign for prospects of finding life elsewhere.

Reductionism, as a paradigm, is expired, and complexity, as a field, is tired. Data-based mathematical models of complex systems are offering a fresh perspective, rapidly developing into a new discipline: network science. In Nature http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v8/n1/full/nphys2188.html

Ant贸nio Dam谩sio: The quest to understand consciousness Every morning we wake up and regain consciousness -that is a marvelous fact -- but what exactly is it that we regain? Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio uses this simple question to give us a glimpse into how our brains create our sense of self.

The discovery shows that such planets exist and that they can be detected by the Kepler spacecraft, said Francois Fressin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. They're the smallest planets found so far that orbit a star resembling our sun. Scientists are seeking Earth-sized planets as potential homes for extraterrestrial life, said Fressin, who reports the new findings in a paper published online Tuesday by the journal Nature. One planet's diameter is only 3 percent larger than Earth's, while the other's diameter is about nine-tenths that of Earth. They appear to be rocky, like our planet. In NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=144020758

Flavor network and the principles of food pairing

In Ted http://www.ted.com/talks/antonio_damasio_the_quest_to_understand_co nsciousness.html

Detecting Novel Associations in Large Data Sets Identifying interesting relationships between pairs of variables in large data sets is increasingly important. Here, we present a measure of dependence for two-variable relationships: the maximal information coefficient (MIC). MIC captures a wide range of associations both functional and not, and for functional relationships provides a score 2 that roughly equals the coefficient of determination (R ) of the data relative to the regression function. MIC belongs to a larger class of maximal information-based nonparametric exploration (MINE) statistics for identifying and classifying relationships. We apply MIC and MINE to data sets in global health, gene expression, major-league baseball, and the human gut microbiota and identify known and novel relationships. In Science http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6062/1518

LHC reports discovery of its first new particle Prof Paul Newman, from the University of Birmingham, added: "This is the first time such a new particle has been found at the LHC. Its discovery is a testament to the very successful running of the collider in 2011 and to the superb understanding of our detector which has been achieved by the Atlas collaboration already." In BBC

! The cultural diversity of culinary practice, as illustrated by the variety of regional cuisines, raises the question of whether there are any general patterns that determine the ingredient combinations used in food today or principles that transcend individual tastes and recipes. We introduce a flavor network that captures the flavor compounds shared by culinary ingredients. Western cuisines show a tendency to use ingredient pairs that share many flavor compounds, supporting the so-called food pairing hypothesis. By contrast, East Asian cuisines tend to avoid compound sharing ingredients. Given the increasing availability of information on food preparation, our datadriven investigation opens new avenues towards a systematic understanding of culinary practice. In Nature: http://www.nature.com/srep/2011/111215/srep00196/full/srep00196.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16301908

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