ASSYST is a multi-disciplinary coordination action with diverse connections and perspectives. When working in each of our own offices we can sometimes forget the amount of effort that other partners are putting into their own tasks. This is why, from time to time, the ASSYST partners get together, talk and evaluate how the coordination action is progressing. During the week of April 22, the ASSYST team met in Brussels to discuss on the project. It was also the time of the annual review meeting with the European Commission. This review meeting evaluated to what extent we had met our objectives for the first year and looked at the continued relevance of the work plan for the years ahead. The comments of the reviewers left the team with a positive felling about the work that has been carried out and with an optimistic outlook for the second year that just started.

The ASSYST coordination action is a challenging project. You deal with people that have different perspectives on what a complex system is, or how this field connects to policy makers. To tackle these different aspects, different competencies are needed. Viswanathan Anand, the World Champion of Chess, once said: “The team is a good amalgam of style, people and geography.” In fact this could be applied to the ASSYST team. Although from different disciplinary and geographical origins, it’s in these differences that we evolve the solutions to the challenges posed by the new Complex Systems research community. The first year has now passed and we hope that you’ve enjoyed the result as much as we’ve enjoyed producing it. We promise to bring new and exciting things related to Complex Systems domains in the next couple of years.

The Assyst Team

By Thomas O. Richardson et al.“The success of social animals (including ourselves) can be attributed to efficiencies that arise from a division of labour. Many animal societies have a communal nest which certain individuals must leave to perform external tasks, for example foraging or patrolling. Staying at home to care for young or leaving to find food is one of the most fundamental divisions of labour. It is also often a choice between safety and danger. Here we explore the regulation of departures from ant nests.”In PLoS ONE - http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=42

“Professor Friston has developed a mathematical law that approaches a grand unifying theory of how the brain works. A unifying theory with a simple equation to follow could potentially unravel the mysteries behind neurogenetic disorders, other diseases, and how we as humans process decision-making and learning. Around 35 percent of all diseases in humans find their origin in the brain.”

In Cordis - http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=43

“A new cross-disciplinary research project backed by the Austrian Science Fund has been established so that geophysicists can develop a better understanding of how the Earth's atmosphere operates. Researchers at the Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics at Vienna University of Technology (TU) in Austria will study the ways in which the Earth's atmosphere supports life on the planet, as well as how it affects it in many other ways including its gravitational field, its shape and its rotation.”

In Cordis - http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=44

By Vittoria Collizza and Alessandro Vespignani

“The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in history. Beginning in 1347, the plague took just three years to spread from Constantinople in western Turkey to Italy and then on to the rest of Europe, leaving nearly a quarter of the continent’s population dead in its wake. Historical studies confirm that the disease diffused smoothly, generating an epidemic front that travelled through the continent as a continuous wave at a rate of about 200–400miles per year.”In Physics Word - http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=45

By Meeyoung Cha et al.

“Directed links in social media could represent anything from intimate friendships to common interests, or even a passion for breaking news or celebrity gossip. Such directed links determine the ?ow of information and hence indicate a user’s in?uence on others—a concept that is crucial in sociology and viral marketing. In this paper, using a large amount of data collected from Twitter, we present an in-depth comparison of three measures of in?uence: indegree, retweets, and mentions.”

In AAAI Conf on Weblogs and Social Media - http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=46

By Zan Pan

“In the realm of cellular automata (CA), Conway’s Game of Life(Life) has gained the most fondness, due to its striking simplicity of rules but an impressive diversity of behaviour. Based on it, a large family of models were investigated, e.g. Seeds, Replicator, Larger than Life, etc. They all inherit key ideas from Life, determining a cell’s state in the next generation by counting the number of its current living neighbours. In this paper, a different perspective of constructing the CA models is proposed.”In arXiv.org - http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=47

By Rowena Ball

“Although alternative energy such as wind and solar is slowly coming on line, most realistic analysts agree that coal must continue to provide at least some of our power for the foreseeable future. But available technologies to extract CO2 from the flues of power stations are far from economically viable. Unless the capture step can be done for less than around 15 euros per tonne of carbon dioxide captured a technology is not economically viable. Developing countries in particular are not going to be able to afford it.”

In ScienceWise - http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=48

The European Commission organized a workshop that brought together the COSI-ICT projects in Brussels this March 25. The workshop aimed at promoting interaction between the projects with the idea that output of research can be bigger than that of the single parts.

The programme included presentations by ASSYST amd all 4 integrated projects (Socionical, QLectives, Cyberemotions and Epiwork). Other topics covered included the importance of the FET program, opportunities for researcher mobility, a description of one possible idea for the FET Flagship initiative called FuturIcT, and the integrated projects presentations. A lively round-table discussion about international cooperation, flagship initiatives, open access and the future of ICT research was held during the afternoon.http://assystcomplexity.eu/news.jsp?article=44

http://eccs2010.eu/satellitemeetings

We present in this issue of the Newsletter the second batch of Satellite Meetings at ECCS’10, to be held on September 16. Please refer to the previous Newsletter or the ECCS’10 webpage for the complete list of Satellite Meetings.

http://phd.eccs2010.eu/

Organizers: Andrea Apolloni, António Fonseca, David Rodrigues, Iain Kusel, Larisa Mihoreanu, Martine J. Barons

The Young Researchers Session at ECCS2010 seeks to collect together a network of complex systems science researchers at an early stage in their careers (graduates, M.Sc., Ph.D., PostDocs, Lecturers), to facilitate a dialogue between individuals and groups from an intentionally diverse set of domains. We aim to encourage the presentation of experimental results within this supportive, interdisciplinary group, and to foster collaboration between people from within the complex systems community who may not otherwise have come across experimental techniques and approaches from outside their 'comfort zone'.

Emphasis will therefore be on creating a stimulating and interactive environment, with a focus also on the bigger questions at large within complex systems research. To this end, presenters will be asked to allude to the 'bigger picture' questions within their domain and in complex systems, the limits and goal of their approach and the use of technique/tools commonly used in other disciplines (different from their own), and science as a whole from their perspective. Crucially, we aim to establish a collaborative environment that will be available after ECCS2010 to foster these links.

Speakers within this session are therefore encouraged to submit a presentation and / or paper based on their research within complex systems science, during which ample time will be allocated for group discussions. We aim to broaden discussion to all areas that concern the young researcher. To this end, discussion may involve practical advice on research tools and methodologies, establishing a social media presence, poster and article publication and discovering job opportunities. Formalising these areas may include a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of participants research activities. In short, as much discussion as is possible towards encouraging the young researcher to push complex systems science forward theoretically and practically.

http://users.isi.it/%7Edoocn/

Organizers: Monojit Choudhury, Niloy Ganguly, Animesh Mukherjee, and Fernando Peruani

“Network Science” has recently attracted the attention of a large number of researchers from across various disciplines, mainly due to its ubiquitous applicability in modelling the structure and dynamics of large-scale complex systems (both natural and man-made). Examples of such systems, exhibiting complex interaction patterns among their constituent entities, range from genetic pathways and ecological networks to the WWW, peer-to-peer networks, and blogs and online web-social networks (such as Facebook, Orkut and Twitter).

For the past three years, the primary aim of the series of workshops “Dynamics on and of Complex Networks”, 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 behaviour of the network. On the other hand, Dynamics of networks mainly refers to various phenomena (for instance self-organization) that go on in order to bring about certain changes in the topology of the network.

It has become clear from the past series of workshops “Dynamics on and of Complex Networks” that modelling social and information dynamics through networks has gained enormous importance. Consequently, this year the workshop will focus on this particular theme, i.e., “modelling social and information dynamics through methods of complex networks”.

http://eccs2010.eu/sm_entre

Organizers: João Fiadeiro and Carlos Manuel Oliveira

Artistic research and scientific research, with its dissimilarities and kinships, relate to each other, nowadays, with a distance that seems to be resulting more out of a lack of opportunities to share and collaborate, than of a mistrustful holding-back into what are, normally, different epistemological and methodological fields of work. Despite of these differences, both kinds of research strive to explore new territories and perspectives, and generate new ideas and understandings.

It has been becoming clear that the knowledge some artists convey through the exploration of conceptual and methodological models in their working processes is a strong alternative to more institutionalized knowledge production schema. Live arts in particular, as long as the presence and action of the subject are the locus of its aesthetical exploration, permit embodied experiences of research and, therefore, the formulation of an embodied knowledge that makes no distinction between an interior subjectivity that looks at an exterior alterity.

On the other hand, non-dualistic scientific traditions that demand for the researcher the same embodied formulation of knowledge have been replacing old modes of knowledge production in which the subject was concerned with something exterior to him/her without taking into account his/her own experience of it. This shift obliges scientific research to have methodological concerns that live artists, when taking a research stance in regard to their working processes, are quite familiar with.

With this meeting we aim to contribute to bringing arts and sciences closer without falling into the stereotyped collaborations where artists and scientists, instead of fuse and contaminate, merely illustrate and ornament each other’s activities. We want to contribute to the understanding of how research in contemporary arts, namely the ones coming from live arts in the fields of improvisation and real time composition, can influence the reasoning around and about questions that are common and transversal to science and arts, such as embodiment, representation, perception, decision-making, emergence, self-organization and creativity.

http://www-lih.univ-lehavre.fr/~bertelle/epnacs2010/

Organizers: M.A. Aziz-Alaoui, Cyrille Bertelle, Gérard H.E. Duchamp, and Miguel A.F. Sanjuan

The 7th ECCS world's largest gathering of researchers in COMPLEX SYSTEMS will be held in Lisbon, Portugal, on 13-17 September, 2010. You are cordially invited to submit a paper to our Satellite Meeting in this Conference, which is the third one we have organizing in ECCS meetings, after:

EPNADS'05 organized in the 2nd European conference of ECCS in Paris, France in 2005 andEPNACS'2007 organized in the 4th European conference of ECCS in Dresden, Germany in 2007.The aim of this Satellite Meeting is to study EMERGENT PROPERTIES arising through dynamical processes in various types of natural and artificial systems. The session is concerned with multidisciplinary approaches for getting representations of complex systems and using different methods to extract emergent structures. Equations formulation can lead to the study of emergent features such as self organization, opening on stability and robustness properties. Invariant techniques can express global emergent properties in complex and dynamical evolution systems. Artificial systems such as a distributed platform for simulation can be used to search emergent placement during simulation execution. Special attention is paid to bio-complexity (but not limited to this topic) where global emergent properties can be detected.

http://assystcomplexity.eu/short/?id=49

Organizers: Nathalie Peyrard, Stéphane Robin, Régis Sabbadin, and Matthieu Vignes

A modelling drill for scientists is now to build up models that process modern biological data in order to gain a better understanding of involved mechanisms or for control/management of biological systems. These data are characterized by a large number of entities in interactions (e.g. individuals in ecology, hosts in epidemiology, genes in regulation networks). Graphical models incorporate an interesting theoretical framework in terms of flexibility to integrate such interactions and an intuitive representation of the system. Still new computational issues arise when designing graphical models specific to the data we just mentioned.

In genomics and bioinformatics, biological network modelling aims at describing interactions between the components present in a cell. These interactions may furthermore evolve along time. Undergoing processes or structures can often be described via latent variables. Models combining all these dimensions raise strong difficulties in terms of inference, mainly because of very intricate dependency structures. Some distributions can then only be approximated and classical statistical methodology therefore needs to be adapted.

In epidemiology or ecology, the systems under study present not only spatial but also temporal dynamics. The number of nodes (individuals) can be moderate as compared to systems biology problems, but dealing with the interactions is still challenging. If the biological system is controlled or managed (epidemics control, species conservation), reasoning on these highly structured systems is limited by the capacities of the available decision optimization frameworks. Due to all these specificities, it is necessary to adapt classical methodological tools for estimation / prediction / optimization / planning.

http://eccs2010.eu/sm_policy

Organizers: Sylvie Occelli, Yasmin Merali, Ferdinando Semboloni, Jeff Johnson, and Jorge Louçã

The rapid evolution and expansion of ICT capabilities, capacity and pervasiveness gives rise to opportunities and challenges for the sustainability and transformation of society and economy. For policy makers, the increased complexity of the networked world demands a re-evaluation of the role, task and impact of policy making.

Advances in ICT and computational approaches afford novel ways of policy design, which in turn require new forms of institutional organisation and management. Whereas policy-making could be loosely understood as an activity favouring the alignment between the internal and external complexity of socio-economic systems, adaptation and innovation in policy making are pre-requisites for the viability of these systems in dynamic contexts.

The purpose of this meeting is to begin an articulation and investigation of the issues that need to be addressed by both the complex systems scientific community and the governmental agencies involved in this domain, and to set the agenda for research activities to be actively pursued.

http://cfpm.org/scive/

Organizers: Bruce Edmonds, David Hales, Mario Paolucci, Juliette Rouchier

This workshop aims to promote inquiry into social phenomena that involve value-exchange, and in particular on systems for credit and value transfer that do not rely on contract or centralised record keeping. Examples include: local baby-sitting circles, informal lending of books among friends, generalised exchange and the Hawala/Hundi systems of money transfer.

Informal value transfer and credit networks involve people or institutions providing credit or value transfer services based on social trust rather than laws and contracts. Such networks constitute a complex system that have been relatively unmodelled yet have a significant impact on people's lives (anthropologists have studied them for a long time). ICT advances – for example the reduction of social distance and the advent of economically-feasible micro transactions – allow for significant improvements in reach and quality of these networks and might allow the release of presently untapped social resources.

We aim to contribute to understanding and to change in networks for credit and value transfer by individual based simulation. Many aspects of human cooperation involve some exchange of value and are the traditional subject matter of the field of economics. However this exchange often involves many social processes and mechanisms other than those usually considered by economists, including: social norms, altruism, reputation, trust, group membership, friendship, kinship, identity, status etc. These can only be understood by modelling them at the individual level (with possible analytic models later), using techniques such as agent-based simulation to take into account their social complexity.

The above artefacts are going to play an ever more important role thanks to the removal of barriers and to individual empowerment allowed by the growth of communication networks. As a consequence, the conversion of the above processes and mechanisms to their monetary value could grow more and more difficult, and the financial institutions that move and manage money could get reshaped. Two contrasting forces are at work here. On one hand, the ease with which value and credit can be transferred worldwide favours large, powerful organizations, whose aims grow less and less related to the territory. On the other hand, individuals can exert a stronger control on their own (small-scale) resources, creating a potential for peer finance, where mental constructs can play a very important role. We already see the effects of this second force in the rise of micro business and micro finance.

This workshop invites contributions of individual-based models of these aspects of society that involve value exchange or coordination. The economic processes of price, supply/demand and varieties of economic rationality (e.g. bounded rationality, optimisation etc.) are relatively well studied – this workshop aims to concentrate on the other social aspects involved.