Month: May 2024

Foundational Papers in Complexity Science for Emerging Award Winners

SFI Press launched Foundational Papers in Complexity Science this May. The four-volume collection, edited by SFI President David Krakauer, contains 88 typeset articles, each with introductions and commentaries from leading scientists.

Volumes 1 and 2, featuring papers spanning the years 1922 to 1973, are out now. The third and fourth volumes include work from the final decades of the 20th century and will be published later this summer.

The Santa Fe Institute is sponsoring a book set for each of the upcoming Emerging Award Winners, to be announced during the next Conference on Complex Systems in Exeter, UK in September.

More at: cssociety.org

Collective responses of flocking sheep to a herding dog

Vivek Jadhav, Roberto Pasqua, Christophe Zanon, Matthieu Roy, Gilles Tredan, Richard Bon, Vishwesha Guttal, Guy Theraulaz

Across taxa, group-living organisms exhibit collective escape responses to stimuli varying from mild stress to predatory pressures. How exactly does information flow among group members leading to a collective escape remains an open question. Here we study the collective responses of a flock of sheep to a shepherd dog in a driving task between well-defined target points. We collected high-resolution spatio-temporal data from 14 sheep and the dog, using Ultra Wide Band tags attached to each individual. Through the time delay analysis of velocity correlations, we identify a hierarchy among sheep in terms of directional influence. Notably, the average spatial position of a sheep along the front-back axis of the group’s velocity strongly correlates with its impact on the collective movement. Our findings demonstrate that, counter-intuitively, directional information on shorter time scales propagates from the front of the group towards the rear, and that the dog exhibits adaptive movement adjustments in response to the flock’s dynamics. Furthermore, we show that a simple shepherding model can capture key features of the collective response of the sheep flocks. In conclusion, our study reveals novel insights on how directional information propagates in escaping animal groups.

Read the full article at: www.biorxiv.org

Migration and Mobility Research in the Digital Era (MIMODE 2024)

The recent availability of massive amounts of digital data have profoundly revolutionized research on migration and mobility, enabling scientists to quantitatively study individual and collective mobility patterns at different granularities as generated by human activities in their daily life.

Read the full article at: www.demogr.mpg.de

Eleventh International Conference on Guided Self-Organization (GSO-2025)

​”Guided Self-Organization: Machine Learning in Embodied Agents”
The 11th International Conference on Guided Self-Organization takes place during 12-14 February 2025 in Tübingen, Germany. GSO-2025 is organized by The University of Tübingen, The Hamburg University of Technology, The Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, and The International Association for Guided Self-Organization (TIA-GSO).
Research Aims and Topics
The goal of Guided Self-Organization (GSO) is to leverage the strengths of self-organization (simplicity, parallelization, adaptability, robustness, scalability) while still being able to direct the outcome of the self-organizing process. GSO typically has the following features: (i) an increase in organization (structure and/or functionality) over some time; (ii) the local interactions are not explicitly guided by any external agent; (iii) task-independent objectives are combined with task-dependent constraints.

GSO “aims to regulate self-organization for specific purposes, so that a dynamical system may reach specific attractors or outcomes. The regulation constrains a self-organizing process within a complex system by restricting local interactions between the system components, rather than following an explicit control mechanism or a global design blueprint.” Information theory, nonlinear dynamics and network theory are core to many of these methods, and quantifying complexity, its sources and effects is a common theme.
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The GSO-2025 conference will bring together invited experts and researchers in machine learning, artificial life, self-organizing systems, and complex adaptive systems, with particular emphasis on autonomous agents, information theory, critical phenomena and emergent behaviour. Special topics of interest include: reinforcement learning, intrinsic motivations, origin of life, systems biology, physics of life, unconventional computation, swarm intelligence, measures of complexity, criticality, complex networks, information-driven self-organization (IDSO), etc.

The program includes three days, with five keynote talks, and a number of regular onsite presentations on each day. There are no registration fees for the conference.

More at: www.guided-self.org

Celebrate 20 years of the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit

Please join us to celebrate 20 years of the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit! The exhibit is curated here at CNS and has traveled the globe showcasing best examples of information visualization.

When?  June 6, 2024 from 4PM to 6PM EDT.

Where?  In person at University Collections at McCalla, 525 E 9th St., Bloomington, IN 47408 or online via Zoom webinar.

What?  Reception. Enjoy refreshments, remarks from the exhibition curators, presentations from teams whose works have been selected for inclusion in the exhibit this year, and the opportunity to try out a data visualization in VR.

Why?  To introduce the latest additions to the exhibit and celebrate the 20th anniversary of the inception of the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit, see 100 maps and 40 interactive macroscopes at scimaps.org.

More at: cns-iu.github.io