ASSYST / CSS Newsletter Number 26 - January 2012
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Transcript of ASSYST / CSS Newsletter Number 26 - January 2012
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Happy New Year from The ASSYST team
Happy New Year !
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!
-- The ASSYST Team
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Number 26, January 2012 | www.assystcomplexity.eu | www.cssociety.org
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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.
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
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.
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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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
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 Self-
Organizing 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
Evostar 2012 Evostar 2012
University of Málaga
11 Apr 2012 to 13 Apr 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
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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
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“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)
Prof. Dr. Petra Ahrweiler
Innovation Research Unit – UCD Dublin http://casl.ucd.ie/iru/
University College Dublin,
Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland
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 [email protected].
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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Web: http://assystcomplexity.eu
RSS: http://assystcomplexity.eu/rss.xml
Twitter: http://twitter.com/assystcomplex
FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/assystcomplex Email: [email protected]
Feedback: http://assystcomplexity.ideascale.com/
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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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Reading Snippets
The network takeover
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
António Damásio: 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.
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
that roughly equals the coefficient of determination (R2) 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 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16301908
First 'Earth-Size Planets Beyond Our Solar System' Discovered Scientists have found two Earth-sized planets orbiting a
star outside the solar system, an encouraging sign for prospects of finding life elsewhere.
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
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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 data-
driven investigation opens new avenues towards a systematic understanding of culinary practice.
In Nature: http://www.nature.com/srep/2011/111215/srep00196/full/srep00196.html