Engineering and Control of Self-Organization

Overview

Artificial complex systems can be created to analyze, model and regulate natural complex systems. Conversely, new and emergent technologies can find inspiration from natural complex systems, whether physical, biological or social. Modeling and simulation are crucial complementary tools in the exploration of complex systems. The recent and fast-growing development of complex systems research in many scientific fields, along with the strong interdisciplinary interactions that it created, was greatly stimulated by the striking advances in computer networks and high-performance calculation. Information and communication technologies represent today a major tool of investigation in complex systems science, often replacing analytic and phenomenological approaches in the study of emergent behavior. In return, information technologies also benefit from complex system research.

The ECSO e-track features innovative cross-disciplinary fields that attempt to solve, at their core, the paradox of “engineering and controlling self-organization” in various ways. For this reason, ECSO researchers often have difficulties finding a home in traditional venues – established conferences or journals, university departments or schools – as they are torn between scientific domains focused on the observation and modeling of natural complex systems (in which they appear too “artificial” and disconnected from “real data”) and engineering domains more interested in top-down design and optimization of reliable “complicated systems” than complexity per se (in which their meta-designs appear too “soft” or “bioinspired” and not sufficiently “proven”).

The ECSO e-track thus purports to be a unifying pole between two big families: complex systems and engineeering, which are traditionally not communicating, yet have witnessed the rise of a new, unofficial intersection populated with numerous original ideas and topics. Reflecting this diversity, it will be featuring invited talks in the following areas :

Program

• Invited Talk e-session (129) - René Doursat (9)

• Complex systems engineering: multi-scale collective construction in artificial insects (260) - Seth Bullock (429)

• Collective construction: automating construction with robot swarms (300) - Justin Werfel (471)

• Decentralized sensor networks (301) - Matt Duckham (472)

• Artificial Chemistries: Overview and Computing Aspects (361) - Lidia Yamamoto (538)

• Autonomic computing: autonomic management in open multi-objective computing networks (362) - Ada Diaconescu (539)

• Evolutionary collective robotics: embodied evolution and lifelong learning (407) - Nicolas Bredeche (586)

• Guided self-organization: information dynamics of complex computation (408) - Mikhail Prokopenko (587)

• Morphogenetic engineering: toward programmable complex systems (409) - René Doursat (588)

• Organic computing (410) - Christoph von der Malsburg (589)

• Pervasive adaptation: knowledge commons and design contractualism (411) - Jeremy Pitt (590)

• Swarm chemistry: guiding designs of self-organizing swarms (412) - Hiroki Sayama (591)

• Synthetic biology: toward a behavior-matching genomic compiler of desired cell functions (413) - Franck Delaplace (592)

• Why Soft Robots are So Hard — an advanced introduction to soft and amorphous robotic systems. (437) - John Rieffel (627)

• Spatial computing: from interaction to computation (438) - Antoine Spicher (628)