assyst newsletter march 2012 - number 29 special

Overview

Three years supporting research and the Complex Systems Science community

by the ASSYST Team

In 2009 the FET unit of the European Commission launched its COSI-ICT programme of research for The Science of Complex Systems and Socially Intelligent ICT. The programme has provided funding for four integrated projects (IPs) and the ASSYST coordination action.

Three years latter, ASSYST and the IPs acheived important results. Now that the ASSYST coordination action is arriving to its end this month, this special issue (number 29!) of the newsletter is dedicated to the main challenges and achievements in organising a community around the research in Complex Systems and Socially Intelligence.

The Integrated Projects

ICT-federated social intelligence is a new social phenomenon exemplified by Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. It has very high potential to create beneficial and high added-value services, but is not well understood from a scientific or systems design perspective. The COSI-ICT programme created new scientific knowledge that can be the basis of new applications in the private and public sectors. The ASSYST Coordination Action supported the COSI-ICT initiative and more generally coordinated the complex systems community within Europe and the rest of the world.

Four integrated projects are part of the COSI-ICT programme, and still very active until 2013.

CYBEREMOTIONS - Collective Emotions in Cyberspace is focused on the role of collective emotions in creating, forming and breaking-up e-communities. Cyberemotions involves nine partners in six different countries in Europe, including experts in the psychology of emotions,

Number 29, Special Issue, March 2012 | www.assystcomplexity.eu | www.cssociety.org

Demonstrator Software CMXViewer

Number 29, Special Issue ‐ ASSYST/CSS Newsletter – March 2012

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complexity, web data collection, artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

An example of the outputs proposed by the project is the Demonstrator Software CMXViewer, providing animated graph visualization representing sentiment propagation processes, dynamic visualization of longitudinal network data in 2D and 3D showing sentiment dissemination processes, and sentiment-based dynamic link coloring. See more on the project website ( http://www.cyberemotions.eu/ ).

EPIWORK - Developing the Framework for an Epidemic Forecast Infrastructure project proposes a multidisciplinary research effort aimed at developing the appropriate framework of tools and knowledge needed for the design of epidemic forecast infrastructures to be used in by epidemiologists and public health scientists. The project is a truly interdisciplinary effort, anchored to the research questions and needs of epidemiology research by the participation in the consortium of leading epidemiologists, public health specialists and mathematical biologists.

The GLEaMviz computational tool is a publicly available software to explore realistic epidemic spreading scenarios at the global scale. GLEaMviz Simulator is a multiplatform application that allows to run simulations to assess epidemic scenarios, predict infectious disease spread, and manage health emergencies. It is based on GLEaM, a stochastic metapopulation approach that integrates high-resolution sociodemographic and mobility data to simulate the spread of epidemics at the worldwide scale. GLeaMviz Simulator allows you to explore your epidemic simulations through a highly flexible disease model, a customizable simulation scenario, and an easy to use visualization platform. See more on the project website ( http://www.epiwork.eu/ )

QLECTIVES is a project bringing together top social modelers, peer-to-peer engineers and physicists to

design and deploy next generation self-organising socially intelligent information systems. QLectives selected two

application areas with high potential technological and social impact. The project proposes two “Living Labs” (techno-social communities) which will support quality in Media and Science - QMedia and QScience.

QScience will support scientific innovation by proactively creating social links between members of new scientific communities, facilitating robust reputation, cooperation and rating systems for quality assessment of both content items and other peers. QMedia will support media distribution via dynamic self-organising peer collectives with shared tastes by proactively delivering quality rated media contents to the right groups and hence replace the “one size fits all” centralised channel / broadcast model of mainstream TV, where content often has to compromise quality in order to meet the majority taste. See more on the project

website ( http://qlectives.eu )

GLEaMviz Simulator


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SOCIONICAL aims to develop Complexity Science based modelling, prediction and simulation methods for large scale socio-technical systems. It focuses on the specific example of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) based smart environments. A key component of such environments is the ability to monitor user actions and to adjust its configuration and functionality accordingly. Thus, the system reacts to human behaviour while at the same

influencing it. This creates a feedback loop and leads to a tight entanglement between the human and the technical system. At the same time there is dynamic, heterogeneous human-human, human-technology, and technology-technology communication leading to ad-hoc coupling between components and different feedback loops. The project studies global properties and emergent phenomena that arise in AmI based socio-technical systems from such local feedback loops and their coupling on two concrete scenarios: transportation and emergency/disaster.

The SOCIONICAL iPhone App was deployed during the 6th Notte Bianca Festival in Valletta, Malta. SOCIONICALʼs main focus is creating `smart' environments that will monitor how people behave in emergencies. This leads to a closer link between people and technology. Collected information can help reduce accidents and fatalities by improving communication with people and between people in the crowd. The data collected in Malta is to be used primarily for research and development purposes. It will enhance the test bed for further major research and development studies at subsequent events in London and Munich.

Supporting the Complex Systems Science community

Complex systems science is eclectic and multidisciplinary. The phenomenon that characterises complex systems – the ability for systems to spontaneously change their behaviour – can be observed across the scientific domains. Examples include embryology and cancers in biological systems, meltdown in financial systems,

riots in social systems, epidemics in population systems, traffic jams in transportation systems, crashes in computer systems, network failures in communications systems, and war in political systems. Often these unexpected behaviours are observed because systems have subtle connections to other systems and their dynamics are coupled.

There is no scientific formalism able to represent coherently the dynamics of systems of systems of systems in

any domain, and in many domains there is no scientific formalism to represent the

dynamics of isolated levels – possibly because the levels cannot be isolated. There is currently no science that can predict reliably when large complex physical and social systems will change behaviour from stable and predictable to unstable and unpredictable.

ASSYST supported its scientific community in a variety of ways, coordinating and facilitating the activities within the scientific community, and coordinating the interaction between the scientific community and wider society. In particular, promoting the value of complex systems science to society in general, to those who can apply the science in the private and public sectors, and promoting the science to funding agencies.

Roadmap

ASSYST coordinated the views of the complex systems community on the current state of the art and the possible future scientific directions. It does this through soliciting the views of the community and synthesising them into a roadmap.

Success stories

ASSYST also promoted complex systems science by finding and publishing success stories and lobbying for support. These stories are intended to inform the public

Notte Bianca Festival in Valletta, Malta


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about progress in the science, but they are also intended to demonstrate to governments and funders that this is high added-value science that must be supported in order to advance the social and economic wellbeing of Europeʼs citizens. Success stories will be published as a special issue of the new ʻliquidʼ journal created by the project for the Complex Systems Society. ʻLiquid papersʼ can change from a turbulent stage at the beginning of their lives to something more stable as they evolve. The Liquid Journal of Complex Systems will support this dynamism while periodically publishing conventional paper-based journal alongside its e-publications.

Projects and events

ASSYST has collaborated with many other projects. In particular it supported the FuturICT in its early days before it became independently funded as a Flagship candidate. ASSYST helped to create and launch an exciting new FET project, NESS (Non-Equilibrium Social Systems) and it works with other projects such as GSDP (Global System Dynamics and Policy) and Étoile (Enhanced Technology for Open Intelligent Learning Environments). NESS addresses the problem that the human component of many ICT systems in based on weak science while Étoile addresses the widespread need for education in multidisciplinary complex systems science. ASSYST has organised many dissemination events for the COSI-ICT projects.

NESS - Non-Equilibrium Social Science

( see http://www.nessnet.eu/ )

Liquid Journal: ecology of papers in various liquid forms


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ASSYST is highly international coordinating scientific events all over the world. In 2011-2012 it was very active creating international networks of scientists, especially in Africa and South America in preparation for creating a ʻUNESCO Unitwin Complex Systems Digital Campusʼ for teaching and research.

Meetings and conferences

Many scientific meetings were held in many European countries and with India and China. It has been very strong on policy with meetings held in the UK Parliament and with people from the public and private sectors across Europe.

Two of our most difficult tasks aim to connect complex systems science and COSI-ICT to the public and private sectors. Initially it was not clear where to start, but in 2011-2011 both excelled in making the desired connections. For example a meeting on social norms was held at Henley Business, attracting academics and members of the business community.

A number of meetings were organised around the theme of social computing and the cloud. Others were on ICT for the Green Knowledge Economy in May 2011 in Florence, Visualisation in Complex Environments with FuturICT in November 2011 in Torino, Exploring the Future in Complex Systems for Decisionmaking in Florence in February 2012, and 21st Century Policy Development in London in March 2012. A large Satellite Meeting was also organised at ECCS'11 in Vienna in September 2011 on Policy Modelling. Many of these meetings were reported on the pages of this newsletter.

UNESCO Unitwin Complex Systems Digital Campus ( see http://unitwin-cs.org/ )


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ASSYST has a very high impact through its support for the European Conference on Complex Systems, with ECCSʼ09, ECCSʼ10 and ECCSʼ11 conferences held in Warwick, Lisbon and Vienna, and ECCSʼ12 to be held in Brussels in September 2012.

ASSYST is leading the way towards new approaches to mathematics for complex systems science. The workshop Mathematics in the Science of Complex Systems organised in Venice in February 2011 was a great success with considerable follow-up activity. There was a further MITSOCS meeting at Warwick University in the UK in June 2011, and a second meeting in Venice in February 2012.

ASSYST gave support to about twenty students to attend ECCSʼ11, gaining consider leverage on its modest funds. This support is helping young people to form a research community and this is very much encouraged by the Complex Systems Society. A group of students has self-organised to create a young researcher session at ECCS, and we support this group in every way that we can. ASSYST continues to maintain its excellent relationship with ESSA, the European Social Simulation Association. ASSYST provided bursaries for the ESSA Summer School on Agent-Based Modelling held at the University of Surrey 18-22 July 2011.

The Networks go on

ASSYST provided the space for the emergence of a viable network that will continue to evolve. For ASSYST WP3, responsible for connecting the complex systems community with private- and third- sector organisations it has been an exciting and productive journey. We organised a number of significant events focussing on specific research and practice issues, but bringing together academics and practitioners from a wide range of institutions and disciplines. One of the most rewarding aspects was the ease with which we were all able to function as boundary spanners – between industry and academia, across social and natural sciences and between public-, private- and third sector institutions.

The multi-national and trans-disciplinary scope of our activities is exemplified by the recent Scientific Meeting in Cambridge on Social Media and Social Networks. This brought together academics and practitioners from Europe, the USA and the UK. The harnessing of social networks and social media for shaping and influencing behaviours, opinions, perceptions choices and actions is an ambition of individuals and institutions in public and private sectors and in civil society. The realisation of this ambition brings with it new challenges related to the scale and scope of the manipulation and representation of data, security, governance and legislation, and ethical concerns about its (mis)representation and (mis)use.

The Cambridge meeting succeeded in creating a space for engaging in a discourse with researchers from different disciplines who are producing exciting work in academia, business and society. Its scope was to explore the evolution of technological capabilities and the possibilities that they present for the emergence of social realties exploiting combinations of message, medium and human engagement. The conversations that we began at the meeting will

ECCSʼ11 in Vienna


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continue in various dimensions of space and time, morphing into new research ideas and projects that embrace the technological, social, economic and political dimensions of technology mediated social networks.

Complexity and Public Policy:

engaging into innovative policy action

Engaging complexity science in public policy and showing the potential for innovative social actions and have been main goals of the ASSYST co-ordination action.

The BIG-STEP (Business, Industry and Government – Science and new Technologies for Enhancing Policy) conference in Brussels (April 2010), the Towards a Science of Social Intelligence meeting in London (August 2010), the Policy Making in Complex Adaptive Environment satellite meeting at the Lisbon Conference (September 2010), the ICT for Green Knowledge Economy venue in Florence (May 2011), the Visualization in Complex Environments conference jointly organized with FutureICT in Turin (November 2011), the Exploring the Future in Complex Systems for Decision Making meeting in Florence (February 2012), have been main events in the project life time where those issues have been addressed.

Because of the project, ASSYST members also actively participated in other meetings organized by other groups of the CSS larger community which explored the complex relationships between complexity science and the public sector have also taken place, such as in the ( 9th Aesop Meeting on Self organization and spatial planning, Istanbul , 2011) and in the Policy Modelling satellite meeting organized in the Vienna ECSS 2011 Conference. At national level we can mention the satellite meeting “Complexity and self-organization for public policies” organized in the Input conference on Computer science and Urban and regional planning, 2009, Lecco, Italy.

As a close of the project life course, the final venue in London on March 15, 1st Century Policy Development Exploring how networks and complex systems can inform policymaking in the UK, will take place in Westminster, at the very heart of a national parliament This , however, should be considered as by no means conclusive, but as an important spur for the ASSYST legacy within the CSS community to continue the engagement in connecting the scientific and the policy worlds also in the future.

In fact, as a result of its activities ASSYST does have a legacy to be passed on the CSS community, whose main tenets can be summarized as follows:

Given the present time - of speedy scientific progress and excruciating societal requirements- , connections between the scientific and policy worlds can and should be established although the process is very much situated, being, culture, context and time dependent;

in the establishment, the building process is as much important as the connections themselves: it provides the ways to give sense to the engagement into the scientific-policy relationships over time and to find the means for their legitimacy as well .

The next ECSS conference in Brussels, and its satellite meetings on policy, will represent an opportunity to take up the challenges of the ASSYST legacy, an re-enforce the network of the CSS members who have already engaged in

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The experience gained in the ASSYST meetings suggests that the connections between the complexity and the policy worlds deserve further insights , i.e. investigating the type of innovative policy actions to be devised by better coordinated public and private organizations in order to meet global changes, developing open model platform to support policy actions, increasing the familiarity with modeling approaches by civil servants.

In conclusion the WP4 has made it explicit that the government activity is a complex one, in the sense that not only it interacts with the social context that it aims to steer and manage, but that it has to take into the reactions of the social systems which, themselves, are typically under the signature of complexity. This acknowledgement is engendering enormous consequences both in the internal organization of the public sector and in the ways public policies are conceived and implemented. On the one hand, the public sector - as a complex organization - should develop a self-organizing capability based on the coupling of internal and external networks, to foster the emergence of the distributed intelligence. On the other one, public policies should be able to leverage the outcome resulting from the self-organizing capability of the social systems. This is the challenge public policy has to address. The science of complex system has a main responsibility in engaging for devising successful ways to meet the challenge.

Art and Complex Systems Science

Many in the complex systems community are interested in the relationship between art and science, and ASSYST has sponsored a number of art-science events. Although combining art and science is very interesting and enjoyable in its own right, it can be argued that art can make a contribution to science on many dimensions. For example, art can be a powerful instrument for data collection. Cham and Johnson (1984) cite an example where the artist Julian Burton accompanied scientist Eve Mitleton-Kelly when she conducted interviews. He painted pictures of the organisations being studied based on what he saw and heard, and at one tense meeting these pictures were placed unostentatiously on view. When the most senior person saw the pictures there was considerable tension among the other staff as to what his reaction would be. He burst out laughing, implicitly giving them permission to say things they would otherwise have withheld. In another context, art can be a source of inspiration, as in the case of Hoyleʼs theory of cyclical cosmology arising after seeing a film in which the start and end scene were the same. In a more obvious way, because art has the ability to communicate complicated ideas in accessible ways, it can benefit science by aiding communication within the scientific community, and between the scientific community and wider society, Of course some scientific objects are inherently beautiful and may themselves be considered to be works of art. There are many similarities between art and science, especially in their common concern with representing objects and ideas, and finding new ways of thinking about things. Increasingly complex systems scientists are seeing narrative as a legitimate means of describing systems. Literary modes of thinking and representing systems contrast starkly with accepted scientific methods, but they may provide new ways of exploring and understanding the dynamics of complex systems.

Real-Time Composition, by João Fiadeiro


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Some experiments have generated artworks to explore the interaction between complex systems science and art, such as Michael Petryʼs ʻString Theoryʼ and Damian Gascoigneʼs ʻComplex Embraceʼ (Cham and Johnson, 1984). More recently the choreographer João Fiadeiro ran a workshop with dancers and scientists on his ʻReal Time Compositionʼ method at the European Conference on Complex Systems in 2010 (http://www.eccs2010.eu/knowbody). Thus one can justify art-science events in many ways: they can be part of the scientific process, they can help connect science and scientific ideas to wider society, and in their own right they are a legitimate way to seek insights into the scientific process and to seek new ways of seeing and understanding things.

Ref: Karen Cham and Jeffrey Johnson, ʻArt in the Science of Complex Systemsʼ, 1984, Liquid Journal of Complex Systems, 2012.

Young Researchers

On aspect of ASSYST that was of great interest was the young researchers community that was formed and the catalyst aspect of ASSYST in providing the means for this interdisciplinary debate. For the past 3 years a set of Young Researchers Satellite Meetings were organized in the European Conference of Complex Systems (ECCS) with the support of ASSYST. The first was 'PhD in Progress' in Warwick at ECCS'09, followed by 'Young Researchers Sessionʼ in Lisbon during ECCS'10 and the third edition was

'Phd - Research in Progress Workshop (III) in Vienna during ECCS'11. These meetings were the highlights of a years work of a group of young researchers that gathered at the events. From the discussions and meetings several projects spun off and during ECCS'10 a CSS group of discussion was formed to address the interests of young researchers. This led to the formation of YoCo, a group dedicated to young scientists initiatives supported by CSS and to promote the young scientists role in Complex Systems.

CSS Federation and Complex Systems Community Explorer

The CSS Federation has pursued it development with the aid of the ASSYST project. It is now hosting about 92 websites, gathering more than 9500 users, 2189 of them having a detailed profile. The whole federation receives about 400,000 hits/month.

In order to help people to browse these databases about complex systems we have developed in partnership with ISC-PIF researchers and engineers and the TINA FET Open SA project a new socially intelligent ICT tool to browse all the data collected about the community : the complex systems community explorer. This platform is the main achievement of this period and offers many interesting perspectives for the community. It is now open at http:/communityexplorer.org . This platform makes it possible to browse scholars, their keywords, the labs, the organizations and the job offers in a new, playful way. It is designed to provide a multi-level insight of the complex systems community in real-time.

Example of the semantic landscape of an institution


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CSS image, website, newsletter and digital library

The migration of content and functionality from the ASSYST to the CSS websites has been prepared several months before the end of ASSYST. As a result, the Complex Systems Society public presence on the Internet is now presented under a new image, including a new website, new content, and a new logo.

The ASSYST contents have been adapted to the new web structure, including presenting the monthly newsletters in an on-line readable form.

The ASSYST/CSS Digital Library provides videos from the ASSYST meetings. These videos are between the most important resources that will be inherited by the CSS. The best way to organize and present them in the new CSS website is still being studied. Meanwhile, videos, including those presented in High Definition format, are freely available at http://www.assystcomplexity.eu/video.jsp , both for research and pedagogical purposes.

While the new CSS website has been developed, the ASSYST original website continued to be popular within the community, as it is shown by the large number of visits to some of the videos. The most popular is Dirk Helbing at ECCSʼ10 with more than 1300 views, closely followed by John Symons at Arrábida 2009, Jeffrey Johnson at ECCSʼ11, Eve Mitleton-Kelly at FET 2009, and from other meetings Robert MacKay, PaulBourgine, Michael Batty, George Rzevsky and many others. Some of the ASSYST Integrated Projects (IPs) are well represented and quite popular, such as Daniela Paolotti presenting EPIWORK.


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Coordination

FlashMeeting was the management tool for ASSYST. It was used monthly to review progress and discuss future activities. It is also used for Wiki engineer meetings and for other CSS meetings.

As the ASSYST project draws to an end it leaves us with a cohesive and vibrant community that is throwing out new shoots in many directions. These will continue to be nurtured under the European Complex Systems Society umbrella, and we are already working on new developments that will bring together those who are currently engaged in complexity science-based research and practice with those who would like to know more about the contribution that complexity science can make to dealing with wicked problems that they confront.

by the ASSYST team:

David Chavalarias, David Hales, David Rodrigues, Jane Bromley, Jeff Johnson, Jorge Louçã, Larisa Mihoreanu, Yasmin Merali, Sylvie Occelli, Ferdinando Semboloni, Paul Bourgine

See you soon !

assyst newsletter march 2012 - number 29 special

Documents

cosiict programme of

complex systems community

integrated projects

science of complex systems

cosiict initiative

assyst coordination

epidemiology research

research questions