Applied Research in Complexity Science

About FRIAMGroup
FRIAMGroup is an emergent organization of Complexity researchers and software developers in Santa Fe, New Mexico interested in Agent-Based Modeling, Applied Complexity, Artificial Life, Evolutionary Computation and Swarm Intelligence.

Friday Morning Coffee
The group meets each Friday morning (hence FRIAM) for general discussion and news. No prescribed structure. Typically, the crowd flows in around 9am, hits full strength around 10a, and fades out by 11:30a. We're currently meeting at the cafe at St John's College (Google map). Please park in the Visitors' parking lot (campus map). Light breakfast menu and coffee are available. The meetings are open to anyone interested.

Mailing List
A significant amount of of the interactions for FRIAMGroup occur through the mailing list. New members interested in our topic space are encouraged to subscribe at http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com. Searchable archives are available here.

FRIAMGroup's Applied Complexity Lecture Series
The FRIAMGroup sponsors a lecture series to explore theory, technology and case-studies in Applied Complexity. Dates and topics for upcoming talks will be posted as they are determined (planned to occur roughly monthly). Talks are usually hosted at the Santa Fe Institute in the Medium Conference room or at the conference room at 624 Agua Fria Sreet. Our thanks to Santa Fe Institute and Santa Fe Economic Development, Inc. (SFEDI) for their support. All talks are open to the public.

Lecture Series Schedule
Date	Content
January 17, 2008	Ken Kahn Oxford University and the London Knowledge Lab TITLE: Modelling4All: The intersection of computer modelling, Web 2.0, and Second Life LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room TIME: Thursday, Jan 17, 12:30p Lunch will be available for purchase for $5 ABSTRACT: The recently completed Constructing2Learn Project ( http://dfl.cetis.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/Constructing2Learn) at Oxford University constructed the BehaviourComposer, a modelling tool, and web-based library of composable "micro-behaviours". Students with no prior programming experience were able to build serious agent-based models in two hour sessions. The Modelling4All Project ( http://modelling4all.wikidot.com) aims to take this work further by re-building the BehaviourComposer to be completely web-based. Furthermore we are building a Web 2.0 style site where one can build, run share, discuss, rate, and tag models, model components, tutorials, and model construction lesson plans. Finally we plan to automate the process of generating scripts so that models can be collectively experienced within Second Life. Live demos of the software will be presented. Thank you to Irene Lee for helping arrange this talk.
December 19, 2007	** Note special time 1:30p ** SPEAKER: John Whitfield Science Writer, author of In the Beat of a Heart: Life, Energy, and the Unity of Nature TITLE: D'Arcy Thompson - Science's Most Successful Failure LOCATION: Wednesday, December 19, 1:30p Lunch will be available for purchase for $5 ABSTRACT: When D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson turned 40 in 1900, he was a frustrated man, stuck working as a marine biologist at a minor Scottish university. By the time he died in 1948, he had been acclaimed by his peers, knighted by the king and, it's said, offered his pick of chairs in biology, classics and maths. But his real achievement was to weave the strands of his learning into something greater than the sum of its parts. Thompson pioneered the application of maths and physics to biological problems, yielding a new way of thinking about life, and a new type of explanation in biology - breaking a path that the SFI continues to follow. And, refracting these ideas through his classical scholarship, he wrote 'On Growth and Form', which has been described as 'beyond comparison the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue'. About John Whitfield: I've got a PhD in the evolution of the soldier caste in aphids (Cambridge, 1997). From there I went to work at Nature in a variety of editorial and writing jobs, until leaving in 2004 to write my first book, 'In the beat of a heart: life, energy, and the unity of nature', which came out late last year. Since going freelance, I've also written - mostly about ecology and evolution - for Science, Discover, Seed, PLoS Biology and most other people willing to pay me.
December 14, 2007	Mohammad Mojtahedzadeh, Rod MacDonald Attune Group, Inc Albany, NY TITLE: Working with Visualization and Systems Thinking Tools in Spreadsheet for Better Results LOCATION: Redfish Conference Room, 624 Agua Fria Street, Santa Fe NM TIME: Friday, December 14, 12:30p Lunch will be available for purchase for $5. ABSTRACT: The use of spreadsheets to organize and manipulate data is ubiquitous in business, government and nonprofits. However, tracing explicit and implicit assumptions, communicating the logic, and auditing spreadsheets remain a daunting task. Exposé is an add-on to Microsoft Excel that brings visualization and systems thinking capabilities to the spreadsheet. It allows users to more efficiently audit, analyze, understand, and communicate their spreadsheet models. In this presentation, through simple examples, we will demonstrate how systems thinking techniques can be used to better understand spreadsheets models. The systems thinking modeling capabilities in Exposé helps organize and structure the data and carefully chose the most relevant metrics and key trends in data dashboards and reports. Managers examine repots every day to keep informed about the performance of their organization. The key to successful design of data dashboards and reports is to pick the “right” metrics to monitor the most appropriate trends. About Exposé 2.0: Exposé 2.0 visualizes the interrelationships among the cells and variables in a spreadsheet model and organizes them in tree and causal loop diagrams. The sliders enable the user to quickly perform “what if” analysis, create comparative charts and trace the assumptions and the structure that generate the output. Exposé allows the user to build models in the graphical environment with the equations translated into the spreadsheet instantaneously. About the Presenters: Mohammad Mojtahedzadeh, Ph.D., has focused his work in the area of process design and improvement and understanding the dynamics of nonlinear feedback systems. Mohammad is the managing director of the Attune Group, Inc, a firm that provides management consulting, tools and techniques for collaborative strategy development. He also collaborates with the System Dynamics Group at the University at Albany. Mohammad has served as a consultant to private companies, nonprofit organizations and public agencies in North America. He has also been an Assistant Professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Yazd, in Iran, where he taught system dynamics and quantitative analysis for decision-making. Mohammad holds a Ph.D. from the University at Albany specializing in system dynamics as well as a B.Sc. in Mathematics and a M.A. in Economics, both from the University of Tehran, in Iran. Rod MacDonald, Ph.D., focuses on policy formulation and development for government and non-profit organization. He is the director of the Initiative for System Dynamics in the Public Sector located at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany. He earned his Ph.D. in Public Administration and Policy from the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany where his graduate studies focused on the development of computer simulation models as decision support tools. Rod has used the tools and techniques of system dynamics computer simulation modeling to analyze deposit insurance issues in the banking industry and to address problems in the delivery of mental health services, fleet maintenance, Social Security disability programs, supply chain management, DWI recidivism, traffic safety, the criminal justice system and the management of large scale construction projects.
October 31, 2007	Stephen Guerin Owen Densmore Redfish Group TITLE: Chasing the Pipedream: an informal chat on near-future agent-based modeling and visualization toolsets LOCATION: Redfish Conference Room, 624 Agua Fria Street, Santa Fe NM TIME: Wednesday, October 31, 12:30p Lunch will be available for purchase for $5 ABSTRACT: We will demonstrate some recent projects at the intersection of agent-based modeling, GIS, 3D animation and game design. While mature tools exist for each of these spaces, there remains a frustrating lack of integration. We will discuss potential paths of development for an integrated toolset that allows for rapid prototyping, ease of use in education settings, acceptable performance for real-time visualization and robust editing capabilities. David Beining, Tom Caudell, Jack Ox, Hue Walker and Eric Whitmore of UNM ARTSLab will be special guests and on hand to contribute their unique perspectives..
October 11, 2007	** note special day and time ** LOCATION: Redfish Conference Room, 624 Agua Fria Street, Santa Fe NM TIME: Thursday, October 11, 10:30a-12:30p Light snack and coffee will be served FIRST TALK Learning Dynamics: Lessons from Attractor Reconstruction Polemnia G. Amazeen, Eric E. Hessler, & Jamie C. Gorman Arizona State University and Cognitive Engineering Research Institute, Mesa, AZ Coordination is a multi-level, multi-agent, and naturally important phenomenon. We will present research on the learning of new coordination patterns at three, nested levels of analysis: (1) bimanual coordination, in which the coordinating components are the arms; (2) motor-respiratory coordination, in which the components are the motor and respiratory subsystems; and (3) team coordination, in which people learn to interact to satisfy a team goal. In each of those cases, we will present a traditional method of assessing learning—by looking at learning curves—and the dynamical method of watching attractors evolve with practice. Generalities about learning new coordination patterns will be discussed. SECOND TALK Modern Techniques Reveal Multiple Cognitive Processes in the Control of Movement Eric L. Amazeen and André B. Valdez Arizona State University From the early research of Donders in 1865 to modern fMRI research, psychology has a long analytic tradition of separating and isolating mental processes in order to study them. We will present research on both continuous bimanual movements and discrete aiming movements to show how modern analytical techniques can be used to investigate situations where multiple mental processes occur simultaneously. In one study, the intrinsic dynamics of bimanual coordination will be used to identify the simultaneous contributions of both perception and action (motor constraints) on movement. Then, in two studies of discrete aiming movements, fractal time series analysis will be used to reveal an overlap in planning and control.
September 26, 2007	Shawn Barr Clark University / Redfish Group TITLE: Building Simply with Google SketchUp TIME: Wednesday, September 26, 12:30p LOCATION: Redfish Conference Room, 624 Agua Fria Street Lunch will be available for $5 Abstract: Google SketchUp is free software tool that is useful for creating 3-D models. SketchUp provides a toolbox containing basic tools for drawing, modifying, and texturing 3-D objects. Extensions to these functions can be made within SketchUp using the Ruby API (Application Programming Interface). By giving an informal demonstration in SketchUp, I hope to demonstrate both SketchUp's accessibility to new users and capacity to export 3D models that can be used as agent views in ABM environments such as NetLogo.
September 5 & 12, 2007	Jim Hayes TITLE: Hedging Complex and Chaotic Private Health Insurance Markets and the Uninsured TIME: Wednesday, September 5 and 12, 12:30p LOCATION: Redfish Conference Room, 624 Agua Fria Street, Santa Fe NM Lunch will be available for $5 purchase ABSTRACT: Jim was seduced by the dark side of economics to study how to hedge complex and chaotic cash flows for private health insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the uninsured. He has submitted for publication consideration the first of two book manuscripts on what he found out about hedging these cash flows. His presentation mostly covers financing and hedging complex and chaotic private health insurance markets and the uninsured.
August 17, 2007	Cory Strassburger Helix Studios, Los Angeles TITLE: Sample Hollywood Production Workflows: An informal chat on visualization from the practicioners perspective TIME: Friday, August 17 1p LOCATION: Redfish Conference Room, 624 Agua Fria Street, Santa Fe, NM Lunch will be available for $5 purchase ABSTRACT: Cory will informally present a collection of his animation, directing and post-production work in Hollywood. We'll discuss ways that Complexity simulation output can be informed from the tv and film visual effects pipeline. Cory is a two-time Emmy award-winner for Special Visual Effects, worked on primary visual effects in Minority Report and X-Files among others and has successfully developed software for the Mac platform. Demo reels of Cory's work are available at http://www.alieanna.com/cas_2007_demo.html and http://www.helix.la.
August 13, 2007	Robert Axtell External Faculty, Santa Fe Institute Professor, George Mason University, Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study TITLE: Informal Chat on Agent-Based Modeling and Generative Social Science TIME: Monday, August 13 10:30am *** note special day and time LOCATION: Redfish Conference Room, 624 Agua Fria Street, Santa Fe, NM ABSTRACT: Rob will discuss current research and have an open chat about ABM and generative social science.
August 1, 2007	Lawrence Kuznar Chair, Department of Anthropology Indiana University/Purdue University Fort Wayne, IN "Anthropology of Terrorism: Modeling How Envy, Humiliation and Greed Manifest Violent Conflict in Cross-Cultural Perspective" TIME: Wednesday, August 1 @ 12:30 p.m. LOCATION: Redfish Conference Room, 624 Agua Fria Street, Santa Fe, NM Lunch will be available for $5 purchase ABSTRACT: The rise of ethnic conflict and global terrorism has produced new threats since the end of the Cold War. These threats largely originate in local cultural contexts colored by culturally unique practices, beliefs and organizations. Strategic analysts and military officials have recognized the distributed, culturally based nature of these new threats and have called to add “cultural intelligence” and sensitivity to religious, ethnic, and cultural sensibilities to their arsenal; they have put out a call to anthropology, but there has been frustratingly little progress. A central dilemma researchers and policy makers face is how to generate social theory that is general, but that can explain a bewildering array of specific cultural manifestations. I present a theory of risk taking that holds the promise of explaining the roots of conflict in an extremely wide array of cultural contexts. Key to this approach is a computational methodology that flexibly identifies key, culture-specific values, and measures the degree to which greed or grievance motivates individuals to take risks with respect to these values. Applications of this approach have included coups in ancient states, political mobilization in democracies, revolutions, the rise of nepotistic elites, tribal political dynamics, terrorist movements in Palestine, and the internal dynamics among the 911 co-conspirators. This method permits modeling of complex social systems, and as such, encounters difficult issues for validation, analogous to those encountered when modeling complex physical systems. SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY Dr. Lawrence A. Kuznar is a professor of anthropology from Indiana University – Purdue University, Fort Wayne whose specialties include decision theory, theories of conflict and terrorism, computational modeling, and the ecology of traditional pastoral societies. He has done field research among Aymara herders in southern Peru and Navajo sheepherders and cattle ranchers. He has published articles in journals such as American Anthropologist, Current Anthropology, Human Ecology, Journal of Quantitative Anthropology, Social Science Computer Review, and Journal of Anthropological Research, among others. His book publications include Reclaiming a Scientific Anthropology (Altamira Press, 1996), Awatimarka: The Ethnoarchaeology of an Andean Community (Harcourt Brace, 1995), and two edited volumes, Studying Societies and Cultures (Pergamon Press 2006) and Ethnoarchaeology in Andean South America (International Monographs in Prehistory 2001). His current research focuses on terrorism, computational modeling and verification & validation issues in modeling.
April 4, 2007	Eric Klopfer MIT Urban Studies and Planning / Teacher Education Program "Graphical Programming with StarLogo TNG and open-sourcing StarLogo" TIME: Wednesday, April 4 @ 12:30 p.m. LOCATION: Redfish Conference Room, 624 Agua Fria Street Lunch will be available for $5 purchase ABSTRACT: For years we have been working with students and teachers to help them learn agent based modeling through StarLogo. While we believe the really "hard" problems are conceptualizing models, novices often get bogged down (or intimidated by) the syntax of languages and never make it to those good challenging problems. In an effort to lower the barrier to entry for agent based modeling, we have introduced StarLogo TNG that provides the innovations of a graphical programming language and (almost) 3D world. At the same time the older version of StarLogo has been released under an open source license. We'll talk about both of this lineages in this session.
March 30, 2007	Johan Bollen (LANL) and Marko A. Rodriguez (LANL) "MESUR: Modeling and Analysis of the Scholarly Community" TIME: Friday, March 30, 2007 LOCATION: Santa Fe Institute • Medium Conference Room ABSTRACT: MEtrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources (MESUR) is a 2-year, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded project at the Digital Library Research and Prototyping team of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library. The MESUR project aims to define and validate a range of usage-based metrics of scholarly impact to improve the assessment of scholarly status which is now largely based on citation counts. The project will create a large-scale semantic network representation of the scholarly community that includes those scholarly artifacts for which large-scale real world data exists, i.e. citation, bibliographic and usage data. The semantic network will represent approximately 50 million articles and their associated objects (e.g. authors, journals, publishers, institutions) and 1 billion usage (download) events representing world-wide user activity. A range of usage-based metrics of scholarly impact will be defined and validated using the instantiated semantic network as a substrate. This talk will discuss the MESUR project's objective, work plan and architecture, and conclude with the presentation of a novel algorithmic framework for the analysis of semantic networks. MESUR: http://www.mesur.org/ http://www.santafe.edu/events/abstract/569
March 21, 2007	Lloyd Lubet Corporate Income Taxes State of New Mexico TITLE: Exploring Econometric Systems with Interactive 3D Graphics TIME: Wednesday, 21 March @ 12:30 p.m. LOCATION: Redfish Conference Room, 624 Agua Fria Street Lunch will be available for $5 purchase ABSTRACT: I am interested in exploring financial systems dynamics visually. Baysian Vector Autoregression( with a Gibbs Sampler) has a genetic front- end to enhance visual exploration of system dynamics. I will focus on Volume interventions on stock market pricing Higher Dimensional Response Surfaces with ColorTime plotting. See how prices and volumes interact on a surface with time periods in different colors Neural Net Time Series will also illustrate the interaction between various economic sectors of our economy Time permitting I'll illustrate some things about the Gibbs Sampler
February 28, 2007	Jeff Cares Alidade Incorporated TITLE: On Networks and Games TIME: Wednesday, 28 February 2006 @ 12:30 p.m. LOCATION: Redfish Conference Room, 624 Agua Fria Street Lunch will be available for $5 purchase Jeff has an article in the March Harvard Business Review on strategy and Alidade's particular brand of gaming. He’d like to talk about Networks (subject of last year’s HBR piece) and Games. Folks might be interested in looking at www.newmapgame.com to see one of their Co-Revolutionary games. BIO: Jeff is one of the top thought-leaders in Information Age military innovation. Harvard Business Review named his research to the list of "Top 20 Breakthrough Ideas for 2006", and he has been featured in such Information Age bellwethers as Wired and Fast Company. He is the author of Distributed Networked Operations: The Fundamentals of Network Centric Warfare, and has published other pioneering work in the application of complex systems research to military problems. Jeff consults to the most senior levels of the international defense industry and has been the primary author of numerous transformational concepts, including Distributed Networked Operations, Sense and Respond Logistics, and the Information Age Combat Model. His forthcoming book, Operations Research for Networked Military Systems, will be available in late 2006. Jeff is the founder and CEO of Alidade Incorporated and lectures internationally on the future of military forces. He is a combat veteran of the first Gulf War whose military career has included multiple command tours and more than a decade of service on four-star staffs.
February 20, 2007	Fabio Carrera Visiting Lecturer - MIT Urban Information Systems group Director of City Lab - Worcester Polytechnic Institute TITLE: Knowledge Farming and the Long Tail of Small Cities TIME: Tuesday, February 20, @ 1:30p LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room ABSTRACT: The presentation will introduce the concept of "City Knowledge" and provide insights about how municipalities can get beyond the typical "hunting and gathering" of data and move towards a more sustainable "farming" of information in support of day-to-day decision-making for urban maintenance, management and planning activities. Based on hands-on experiences in cities like Venice, London and Boston, the presentation will then discuss some power-laws that suggest how and where urban data farming should be implemented to maximize the impact of these concepts for the improvement of municipal services and the benefit of urban dwellers.
January 10, 2007	Jan Hauser Integrated Innovation TITLE: Internet Augmented Society TIME: Wednesday, 10 January 2007 @ 12:30p LOCATION: Redfish Conference Room, 624 Agua Fria Street Lunch will be avialable for $5 ABSTRACT: Modern life-patterns have produced many benefits for humanity but some perilous side-effects of our current systems threaten the sustainability of human life and living systems as we know them. Current trends in broadcast media (Radio, TV, Newspapers) do not seem to supply quality information needed to cope with our modern problems. Can "New Media" help to alleviate some of our most pressing problems? Jan will give an informal and interactive overview of the progress on some of his more audacious current projects: - The Augmented Social Network: Building identity and trust into the next-generation Internet (Jan Hauser co-author) http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_8/jordan/index.htm - Targeted Social Networking Systems - Helping birds of a-feather find and join their flock - Miscellaneous Impromptu Discussion on Demand BIO: Jan is a former Principal Architect of Sun Microsystems and Visiting Professor at The Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey. Jan also worked germ detection for Apollo 11, and so-called "Chaords"-- the idea that new self-organizing institutions could be designed from scratch.
December 8, 2006 ** note special time **	Iain D. Couzin Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK & Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, USA Collective Motion and Decision-Making in Animal Groups LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room TIME: Fri Dec 8, 1:00p *** Lunch will NOT be available for this talk ABSTRACT: Animal groups such as bird flocks, insect swarms and fish schools are spectacular, ecologically important and sometimes devastating features of the biology of various species. Outbreaks of the desert locust, for example, can invade approximately one fifth of the Earth’s land surface and are estimated to affect the livelihood of one in ten people on the planet. Using a combined theoretical and experimental approach involving insect and vertebrate groups I will address how, and why, individuals move in unison and investigate the principals of information transfer in these groups, particularly focusing on leadership and collective consensus decision-making. For very large animal groups, despite huge differences in the size and cognitive abilities of group members, recent models from theoretical physics (‘self-propelled particle’, SPP, models) have suggested that general principles underlie collective motion. Such models demonstrate that some group-level properties may be largely independent of the types of animals involved. I shall present recent experimental work on locusts that validates some of the predictions of simple mechanistic models including a density-dependent "phase transition" from disordered to ordered motion. Details of the mechanism by which individuals interact, however, also provide important biological insights into swarm behaviour. Using laboratory studies involving nerve manipulation and field experiments we demonstrate that some swarming insects are in effect on a "forced march" driven by cannibalism. These results will be discussed in the context of the evolution of functional complexity and pattern formation in biological systems.
November 29, 2006	Tom Johnson Institute for Analytic Journalism TITLE: Revealing Some Treasures of Web 2.0 TIME: Wednesday, 29 November 2006 @ 12:30 p.m. LOCATION: Redfish Conference Room, 624 Agua Fria Street Lunch will be available for purchase ABSTRACT: The past 18 months have seen impressive developments in the world of work-a-day applications as common tools like word processors and spreadsheets move off the PC or Mac on your desk to living someplace "out there" in cyberspace. So far, it appears advantages are many -- especially for workgroups -- and the drawbacks few. If you can get to a Web browser and the Internet, you're in business, typically for free. Tom Johnson will demonstrate a bulging tool box of Web 2.0 applications ranging from bookmarking and word processing to file storage and spreadsheets and more. Bring your laptops with WiFi and we can have a "key-along."
Nov 1, 2006	Laura A. McNamara and Timothy G. Trucano Sandia National Laboratories TITLE: Epistemological Issues in Computational Modeling and Simulation and High Consequence Decision-Making TIME: Wed Nov 1, 2006 12:00p ** note special time LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room We will have breakfast burritos with the speakers at Dominics at 10:30a. Everyone invited. No lunch will be provided. ABSTRACT: Since the end of the Cold war, the US intelligence community has faced criticism for repeatedly failing to predict major international events: the end of the Cold war, India and Pakistan’s nuclear tests, terrorist activities within and outside the United States. In response, institutions in the IC have been looking for methodologies and technologies to improve performance in the collection and analysis of intelligence information. In particular, the IC’s analytical community is looking to modeling and simulation tools to revolutionize intelligence analysis, enabling the collective to bridge information gaps and promote knowledge discovery across (or perhaps despite) intellectual, political, and organizational boundaries. This situation is not dissimilar to the crisis that the nuclear weapons laboratories faced in the early 1990s, when the Hatfield Amendment killed the testing program and the DOE introduced Science Based Stockpile Stewardship as the new paradigm for assessing and certifying the safety, security, and reliability of the nuclear stockpile. In particular, both the nuclear weapons and intelligence communities have invested in modeling and simulation technologies for their capacity to synthesize large amounts of information in relatively short periods of time, and for their predictive promise. However, as the nuclear weapons laboratories have discovered, predictive capability is a hard thing to attain, and modeling and simulation tools often raise more questions than they answer. In this talk, we argue that the intelligence community and the nuclear weapons laboratories are facing remarkably similar challenges in developing, assessing, and integrating modeling and simulation tools into their mission activities. In particular, epistemological issues that tend to remain latent in academic research environments get thrown into high relief when information generated by modeling and simulation tools contributes to high consequence decisions. We illustrate this point by reviewing research on modeling and simulation, knowledge production, and prediction in economics, weather forecasting, climate modeling. We then present case studies from the nuclear weapons programs and the intelligence community, both of which reveal the close coupling between technology and organizational dynamics that characterizes modeling and simulation in high-consequence decision making. This talk is the outcome of two years’ worth of discussion and collaboration between Trucano, a mathematician who has spent his career in computational physics at Sandia National Laboratories; and McNamara, a cultural anthropologist who has studied knowledge production in both the nuclear weapons and the intelligence communities. All topics will be discussed at the OUO level.
September 6, 2006	Joshua Thorp RedfishGroup TITLE: Art-induced explorations: Through the looking glass with Processing and augmented reality TIME: Wed Sept 6, 2006 12:30p LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room Lunch will be available for purchase ABSTRACT: What happens when agents start watching you? It is dead simple to turn the camera on in Processing (http://www.processing.org), should we take the red pill or the blue? Bring your laser pointers and find out where this rabbit hole leads.
August 30, 2006	*** note that this FRIAM lecture will be hosted at College of Santa Fe *** David Stout, Cory Metcalf and Luke DuBois College of Santa Fe TITLE: 100 Monkey Garden - Interactive Ecosystem LOCATION: MOV-iN Gallery College of Santa Fe 1600 St. Michaels Dr. Located at Moving Image Arts Department (same building as THE SCREEN) map: http://mov-in.org/aboutus.php TIME: Wed, August 30 12:30p Lunch will be available for purchase ABSTRACT: Video/sound artist and moving image arts Professor David Stout will give a personal tour of this highly immersive interactive ecosystem and digital art space. Using multiple projectors and computer monitors, as well as an array of sound and motion sensing devices, David enables the 100 Monkey spectator to witness a digitally imagined world creating and recreating itself, its rules and dimensions. Accompanying art pieces fill the space and compliment this particular style of digital art. Check out past incarnations of this piece online: http://nfold.csf.edu/Pages/100MonkeyGarden.htm Other works by David Stout: http://nfold.csf.edu/ Santa Fe's THE Magazine review of this installation: http://mov-in.org/Dstout100MonkeyMOV_iN_CDE05-1.pdf BIOS: David Stout is an interactive video-sound artist and one of the worlds leading laptop performers exploring real-time cross-synthesis of sound and image. He is the recipient of the Harvestworks Interactive Technology Award and the Sun Micro Systems Award for Academic Excellence (2004) and a nominee for the both the WTN World Technology Award (2003) and the International Media Art Prize (2004). His work in interactive media includes electro-acoustic scores for stage and screen, live cinema, video-dance, data-base narrative, noise performance and telematic video events that emphasize multi-screen projection as an extension of performer, audience and environment. David currently lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Cory Metcalf is a moving image and sound artist who lives in Santa Fe, NM. His work explores the intersection of human performance, real-time media systems and responsive installation environments. His interests range from the field of bio-mimicry to the practices of aerial theater, extended vocal techniques and instrumental noise-music performance. As a seminal member of the interactive performance group, i2O, Metcalf developed dynamic diffusion sound designs for live acoustics and video performance instruments. Metcalf's interest in physical computing is evidenced in works such as Sensor Swarm, a hybrid interactive performance-installation that employs sensing technology to blur the distinction between the audience and performance, fore-grounding the normally unconscious influence that humans impose on their environment. Currently Cory is working with real-time 3D simulation and complex data feed-back programs to model synthetic-ecologies based on genetic and behavioral processes found in living systems. R. Luke DuBois is a composer, programmer, and video artist living in New York City. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and teaches interactive sound and video performance at Columbia's Computer Music Center and at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. He has done collaborated on interactive performance, installation and music production work with many artists, most recently Toni Dove, Todd Reynolds, Michael Joaquin Grey, Elliott Sharp, and Michael Gordon, and was a staff programming consultant for Engine27 for the 2003 season. He is a co-author of Jitter, a software suite developed by Cycling'74 for real-time manipulation of matrix data. His music (with or without his band, the Freight Elevator Quartet), is available on Caipirinha/Sire, Cycling'74, and Cantaloupe music, and his artwork is represented by Bitforms Gallery in New York City.
August 24, 2006	Charles Macal Director, Center for Complex Adaptive Agent Systems Simulation (CAS2) Decision & Information Sciences Division, Bldg. 900 Argonne National Laboratory Argonne, IL 60439 USA TITLE: Recent Applications of Agent-Based Modeling and Next Directions for RePast TIME: Wed August 23, 1p LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room Lunch will be available for purchase ABSTRACT: In this presentation I will discuss how my colleagues and I are using agent-based modeling in a variety of application areas. The first application describes recently completed work on the impact of deregulation of the electric power market in Illinois, scheduled for January 1, 2007, on spatial electricity prices and the possibilities for agents to establish market power. The second application is completed work on the use of multi-scale agent-based modeling to model the chemotactic behavior of bacteria (translating sensed chemicals into motion) based solely on the underlying signal transduction networks (networks of chemical reactions) that occur inside the bacteria. The third part of the presentation describes ongoing work at various stages of progress in several areas including modeling the transition to the hydrogen infrastructure, modeling the energy markets, a theoretical model of supply chains, a theoretical model of occupational dynamics and the derivation from the underlying social science theories. The presentation concludes by mentioning current work on the Repast agent-based modeling toolkit and the new releases planned for Repast Simphony.
August 9, 2006	Douglas A. Samuelson Homeland Security Institute Attention Allocation in Organizational Decision-Making LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room TIME: Wed August 9, ** 2:00p ** (non-standard time) ABSTRACT: Consider how to improve organizational decision-making by streamlining the process of seeking and allocating the attention of top decision-makers. These decision-makers try to optimize the value they receive by allocating their attention, taking uncertainty into account. In fact, optimizing the benefits of attention results, for the organization’s original problem, in the well-known “satisficing” behavior described by Herbert Simon. In practice, the behavior is often similar to the greedy heuristic for the knapsack problem: a few of the largest topics and many small topics get addressed, while most middle-sized topics are neglected until they become major problems. As in the knapsack problem, more clearly identifying sizes (time and attention required) and values, and considering better ways to allocate space (attention available), produces better results. By encouraging persons familiar with particular issues to “bid” for decision-makers’ attention, giving short, clear estimates of importance and complexity of the issue, and by then rewarding helpful initiative while penalizing overbids, senior decision-makers can substantially decrease the likelihood of overlooking major problems until they become crises. Now consider agent-based models of teams of workers, each with a supervisor, with problems arriving at random by a Poisson process. A problem requires certain skills and a certain number of units of effort for each needed skill. Workers have skills and various numbers of units of work they can accomplish, per skill area, per time period. In alternative versions of the model, problems may arrive at a central point where they are sent to team supervisors, or they may drift through the organization’s space until they encounter a team, or there may be some group decision-making among team supervisors and an overall manager. The simplest model is one team and problems arriving directly to that team’s leader; future work can expand in modular fashion. The version of the model in which problems arrive and drift through the organization’s space randomly until they encounter a team that can solve them appears to approximate – and explain – the behavior of the Cohen, March and Olsen Garbage Can Model. Other, more hierarchical versions are likely to deadlock, overwhelming the managers and unnecessarily idling many of the workers, in a manner that fit intuition for certain large, tightly controlled bureaucracies. Explicitly modeling the attention required by managers and supervisors to assign problems and monitor progress would add another level of complexity and realism. This approach appears to promise a rich variety of interesting results. Presenter: Douglas A. Samuelson is a senior analyst for the Homeland Security Institute, Arlington, Virginia, and President of WINFORMS, the Washington, DC chapter of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS.) He has also been a Federal policy analyst, inventor, high-tech entrepreneur and executive, and university faculty member. He is perhaps best known for his popular and long-running “The ORacle” column in OR/MS Today. He has a D.Sc. in operations research from George Washington University.
June 21, 2006	Joshua Thorp Stephen Guerin Owen Densmore RedfishGroup Title: Frogs in a Blender, Turtles in Processing: stirring an agent-based modeling stew using Blender3D, Processing, and Netlogo on a stadium evacuation project LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room TIME: Wed June 21, 12:30p Lunch will be available for purchase ABSTRACT Primarily a tech review about our recent experiences melding Blender3D (http://www.blender3d.org) with Processing (http://www.processing.org) for an agent-based modeling production pipeline. Netlogo-like language constructs were developed in Processing for use in the interactive real-time models using 50,000 agents. Blender3D was used for stadium modeling and offline 3D animation/rendering on a 730 CPU renderfarm. We'll demonstrate the pipeline in the context of a Homeland Security project visualizing crowd dynamics arising from simulated suicide bomb attacks at Pittsburgh's PNC Baseball Stadium.
June 14, 2006	Brian F. Tivnan The MITRE Corporation & Executive Leadership Doctoral Program George Washington University Title: March–ing forward by leaps and boundary spanning: Coevolutionary dynamics of the adaptive tension between exploration and exploitation LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room TIME: Wed June 14, 12:30p Lunch will be available for purchase ABSTRACT Recognizing the inherent strengths of simulation-based research, James March proved to be one of the earliest pioneers of simulation as a methodological approach in organization science (e.g., Cyert and March’s (1963) Duopoly Model and Cohen, March and Olsen’s (1972) Garbage Can Model). March appreciates that simulation provides the researcher a platform: (a) to explore the inherent complex dynamics of organizations (Dooley & Van de Ven, 1999; Simon, 1962), (b) to conduct experiments that would typically be impossible or impractical in the physical world (McKelvey, 1997), and (c) to study sets of actors who possess an adaptive capacity (Axelrod, 1997) as an alternative to rational actor assumptions which overlook the boundedly rational limitations of their actors (Simon, 1976). Because March’s (1991) paper – “Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning” has emerged as a seminal paper in organization science, the Organizational Code Model (OCM) represents an ideal candidate for replication. As with Prietula and Watson’s (2000) replication and extension of the Duopoly Model, the following four points provide support for replication of the OCM: (a) replication and repeatability represent two of the hallmarks of simulation as a research methodology, (b) replicating the OCM in a modern modeling framework (e.g., Repast) and providing it to the scholarly community in an executable form brings the research to life through the addition of visualization and user interfaces, and (c) this additional availability should increase comprehension within the scholarly community for the OCM dynamics and the robustness of March’s findings, and (d) replication from the model description in the published paper allows for the establishment of relational equivalence (Axtell, Axelrod, Epstein, & Cohen, 1996) between the original and replicated models but also highlights the necessity for additional information on the statistical distributions of the original results to establish distributional equivalence. If available in an executable form, the original OCM provides a platform to conduct additional experiments of seminal concepts in organization science from March and other theorists. For example, the OCM supports Ashby’s (1956) Law of Requisite Variety when comparing the complexity of the organization to that of the environment. Furthermore, the original OCM can also be used to support other March contributions to organizational learning concepts, namely the respective absorptive capacity (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990) of competing organizations and the path dependent nature of organizational learning induced by competency traps (Levitt & March, 1988). In addition to conducting supplementary experiments with the original OCM, a replication of the OCM could also facilitate its extension. Some possible extensions to March’s OCM include: (a) boundary spanning organizational members (Hazy, Tivnan, & Schwandt, 2003; Tushman & Scanlan, 1981) for a direct interface to the environment and increase member heterogeneity in lieu of random replacement of members; (b) interactions between organizational members and boundary spanning members governed by the emergence of trust (Macy & Skvoretz, 1998); (c) generation of the competitive context to which March alludes in his closing comments with multiple instantiations of the OCM as the Organizational components (Tivnan, Forthcoming); and (d) extension of this competitive context to also consider collaborative relationships between organizations (Tivnan, 2004).
May 31, 2006	Carlos Gershenson Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel TITLE: A General Methodology for Designing Self-Organizing Systems TIME: Wed May 31, 12:30p LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room Lunch will be available for purchase ABSTRACT: Our technologies complexify our environments. Thus, new technologies need to deal with more and more complexity. Several efforts have been made to deal with this complexity using the concept of self-organization. However, in order to promote its use and understanding, we must first have a pragmatic understanding of complexity and self-organization. This paper presents a conceptual framework for speaking about self-organizing systems. The aim is to provide a methodology useful for designing and controlling systems developed to solve complex problems. First, practical notions of complexity and self-organization are given. Then, starting from the agent metaphor, a conceptual framework is presented. This provides formal ways of speaking about "satisfaction" of elements and systems. The main premise of the methodology claims that reducing the "friction" or "interference" of interactions between elements of a system will result in a higher "satisfaction" of the system, i.e. better performance. The methodology discusses different ways in which this can be achieved. A case study on self-organizing traffic lights illustrates the ideas presented in the paper. Full paper: http://uk.arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0505009
April 26, 2006	Owen Densmore RedfishGroup / Backspaces TITLE: Java 1.5 Chat: See all the nifty new features 1.5 brings LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room TIME: Wed April 26, 12:30p Lunch will be available for purchase ABSTRACT For-each loop, Generics, Varargs, auto boxing and unboxing, Typesafe Enums, Static imports (especially cool for Math), Printf and formatting. Way cool stuff. I'll drive us through an Eclipse session of several demos, showing all the above. Here are some pointers: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/relnotes/features.html http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/lang/enhancements.html
April 19, 2006	**** note that this talk will be at 1:30p **** Lee Hoffer Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO Joshua Thorp RedfishGroup, Santa Fe, NM TITLE: The Illicit Drug Market Simulation project: Combining ethnography & agent-based modeling LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room TIME: Wed April 19, 1:30p *** Lunch will be available for purchase ABSTRACT The Illicit Drug Market Simulation (IDMS) project is an experimental study using ethnographic data as the basis for programming agent-based models (ABM) of a local heroin dealing network and illicit drug market. Using ABM to grow a local heroin market from “the bottom-up,” the primary aim of the project is to uncover and experiment with, the emergent properties of these self-organizing complex adaptive systems. Additional IDMS aims include: experimenting with policy scenarios intended to disrupt this market, and developing a formal protocol to combine ethnography and ABM in prospective research. IDMS data on Denver’s heroin market come from a number of studies funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse published in the ethnography Junkie Business (Hoffer, 2006). Since the 1950s, the Larimer area of downtown Denver was home to the cities homeless populations, as well as its most active “open-air” illicit drug market. To advance urban renewal efforts, during the mid-1990s, the private sector, law-enforcement and parks department successfully displaced the homeless and dismantled this market. Dealers were arrested, public spaces closed and street-people relocated. However, ethnographic research conducted with a street-based heroin dealing network revealed how dealers flourished during this era, exploiting law enforcement tendencies, utilizing drug brokers and capitalizing on new market opportunities, thereby discrediting the assumption that decreased visibility equals decreased distribution. Concluding that “closing” the market only served to transform it, the IDMS project will reproduce how the heroin market operated, as well as its historic transformation. The project will also simulate the business operations of the heroin dealing network researched. Preliminary simulations and experiments will be presented.
March 15, 2006	*** note that this talk will be at 2p *** Michael C Gizzi, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Political Science Institute for Modeling Complexity Mesa State College TITLE: Reconsidering Debates over Plea Bargaining with Agent-Based Modeling LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room TIME: Wed March 15, 2p *** Lunch will be available for purchase ABSTRACT In this presentation I will discuss how my colleagues and I are using agent-based modeling as a way to evaluate research on plea bargaining in trial courts. Using NetLogo, we created two different models of plea bargaining. The first examines the impact of eliminating plea bargaining on prison populations and court delay. The second model explores the decision-making processes which shape plea bargaining. By modeling defense counsel, prosecutors, judges, and defendants, we are able to examine different theories explaining how and why plea bargaining occurs.
February 22, 2006	Jane Quillien The Nature of Order LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room TIME: Wed Feb 22, 12:30p Lunch will be available for purchase ABSTRACT In the four volumes of The Nature of Order, Christopher Alexander pursues nothing less than the nature of life itself. Life, Alexander holds (quite literally) is an attribute of space and to speak about space is to speak about geometry. In this Friam talk, the objectives will be limited to two. The first objective is to provide a helicopter view of the geometric properties of space according to Alexander. There are 15 - so even a three minute introduction of each one will take up most of our time. The second objective is to pose a question for discussion. These 15 properties are introduced in Volume One where the point of view is static - a given space at a give moment. Volume two grapples with the unfolding of space over time. Alexander does not have any sort of general theory for just how these 15 properties might interact in the unfolding. Interestingly, he has never asked programmers if simulations were a way to explore hunches. So, I'm asking the Friam group.
December 14, 2005	Roger Critchlow The Complexity of Watching Paint Dry LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room TIME: Wed Dec 14, 12:30p Lunch will be available for purchase ABSTRACT I'll discuss how nanoparticles suspended in a thin layer of liquid form self-organized patterns and present several simulations of the system produced with different tools. The system itself is interesting as an extremely simple physical process which produces a variety of complex morphologies. So I like it as model of how simple complexity can be. The implementations of the simulation are interesting because they vary roughly a thousandfold in their efficiency. The fastest is the Processing language (http://processing.org), developed for computer art, visualization, and procedural graphics.
November 30, 2005	Stephen Guerin, RedfishGroup Keith Hunter, Carnegie Mellon University, Heinz School of Public Policy and Mgmt TITLE: An Agent Based Model of Affordable Housing Search LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room TIME: Wed Nov 30, 12:30p Lunch will be available for purchase ABSTRACT Housing mobility is not well understood. The Housing Choice Voucher Program informally known as Section 8 housing program is characterized by the issuance of vouchers that ultimately are not used for relocation. We provide an agent based simulation that incorporates observed attributes of renters and neighborhoods. Using this model, we test simple hypotheses about patterns of movement for Section 8 vouchers. We propose a richer model for informing policy decisions about public housing resource deployment. This WedTech talk will feature the quick and dirty techniques used for incorporating Pittsburgh GIS / demographic data into the NetLogo ABM.
November 16, 2005	Jim Girard High Fidelity Crowd Simulation LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room TIME: Wed Nov 16, 12:30p Lunch will be available for purchase ABSTRACT I've recently finished a small contract to expand on some previous agent based models of physical crowds and non-lethal weapons. The goal was to build a model with a higher degree of physical realism (ie: high fidelity) that would (hopefully) be more accessible to decision makers. From an ABM perspective, some of the issues that needed to be addressed were: - merging off-the-shelf simulation software into an ABM - moving to continuous time and space concepts - "embodiment" of the agents I'll present demos and results and hope to get feedback on some of the problems which cropped up (and remain unsolved). I'll also discuss some of the future opportunities for this simulation approach.
September 28, 2005	Frank Wimberly Causal Reasoning and Agent Based Models TIME: Wed Sep 28, 12:30p LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room Lunch will be available for purchase ABSTRACT A general review of statistical causal reasoning will be presented including the use of Bayesian Networks for results of searches using discrete data and Structural Equation Models for those using continuous data. The possibility of applying these methods to data produced by agent-based models will be discussed and data from a drug market model by Agar, Densmore and Guerin will be used as an example.
August 24, 2005	Tom Johnson Verifying Data in Public Records Databases AFFILIATION: Institute for Analytic Journalism TIME: Wed Aug 24, 12:30p LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room Lunch will be available ABSTRACT Tom Johnson will talk about the problem of and strategies for verifying data in public records databases. An uncountable number of public agency databases have been created in the past 30 years. More and more, public and private decision-makers draw on this collected, digital data to make decisions about everything from disciplining doctors to zoning decisions to law enforcement to deciding who gets to vote. The often-unquestioned assumption is that the data, as found, analyzed and presented by a government or quasi-government agency, is valid data. Increasingly, anecdotal evidence indicates that data is riddled with serious errors. Often, if initial investigations indicate the data is too suspect -- and the cost to clean the data by hand or automatically too high -- then good and important analysis and investigations are put aside. Tom will also describe an upcoming workshop -- Ver 1.0 -- the Inst. for Analytic Journalism is sponsoring in Santa Fe in April 2006. The workshop is unique in that it is believed to be the first ever to bring together eight to ten journalists with track records of high-concept involvement in analytic journalism and who have demonstrated in-depth knowledge of database sciences. They will be joined by an equal number of biomedical researchers, public administrators, data-mining experts, statisticians, forensic accountants, computer scientists and social scientists interested in the problem of database veracity. [1] "Ver" as in "verification" and "verify" and, from the Spanish verb ver: "to see; to look into; to examine." NB: Sponsorship support is being sought!
August 17, 2005	*** note this talk is at 11 AM *** Douglas Roberts TITLE: TRANSIMS and EpiSims: Two examples of large-scale Social Network Simulation Systems SPEAKER: AFFILIATION: LANL, retired; Raven Consulting, Inc. TIME: Wed Aug 17, ** 11:00a ** LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room Lunch will be available ABSTRACT In 1990, work began at LANL to develop a new population mobility / social network simulation capability. Now, 15 years later several software products have been successfully fielded. Two that I will discuss in this presentation are TRANSIMS (TRANSportation SIMulation System) and EpiSims (Epidemiology Simulation System). I will give a brief introduction about the simulation methodologies used by these systems, and will describe the computational platforms that they are fielded on.
August 10, 2005	Mike Agar, Stephen Guerin and Kristin Nichols TITLE: Applied Complexity and the Court TIME: Wed Aug 10, 12:30p LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room Lunch will be available ABSTRACT RedfishGroup is working with the State Of California's Administrative Office of the Courts to ethnographically research and visualize court processes. The end goal is to obtain local perceptions of court quality. We are half-way into a pilot effort and will present some early interpretations, video interviews and data analysis of 25,000 cases in Alameda county. We are soliciting feedback from FriamGroup members for relevant methodology that may assist us going forward.
July 13, 2005	Christopher Harrison Power spectrum of sea level change over fifteen decades of frequency AFFILIATION: Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami, TIME: Wed July 13, 12:30p LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room Pizza will be available. ABSTRACT The power spectrum of relative sea level change has been estimated over more than 15 orders of magnitude in frequency, from a frequency of 1/(591 Ma) to a frequency of 1/(5 s). Although there are still regions of the spectrum where data sampling and duration do not allow the power to be calculated, most notably between periods of 100–1000 years, the general shape of the spectrum is that in which the power depends on the square of the reciprocal frequency, apart from periods between 1 and 100 years where the power spectrum falls off less steeply with increasing frequency. A spectrum in which power depends on reciprocal frequency squared is the same spectrum as that calculated from a random walk signal of finite length. There are some causes that have defined frequencies, such as those associated with tides and the Milankovitch cycles of the ice ages, but there is also a continuum of relative sea level change that requires other causes. The implications of this are discussed in the light of global change and heating of the lithosphere from the bottom. Harrison, C. A., (2002) Power spectrum of sea level change over fifteen decades of frequency
June 29, 2005	Katharina "Nina" Lehmann Evolutionary Processes for the Self-Organized Evolution of Networks AFFILIATION: University of Tuebingen and 2005 SFI Complex Systems Summer School TIME: Wed June 29, 12:30p LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room Pizza will be available. ABSTRACT These days we have many decentrally organized networks whose performance is mainly dependent on the topology of connections. In P2P networks we have the possibility to change the topology of the network in order to achieve desired network properties. In my talk, I will speak about how we can model the decentralized (self-organized) evolution of networks towards topologies with wanted features. PowerPoint slides / PDF Version This talk won Nina the "Best Paper in the Evolutionary Combinatorial Optimization Track" award at GECCO 2005. Congratulations, Nina!
June 22, 2005	E. Dante Suarez On a Hierarchically Decomposed Agent AFFILIATION: Professor of Finance, Trinity University TIME: Wed June 22, 12:30p LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room ABSTRACT I will informally elucidate my ideas on a general theory of collective behavior and structure formation, with a resulting architecture that can be broadly applied. The proposed model represents a decomposition of intent, based on the idea that an agent’s behavior, whether it represents an individual or a group, can be seen as an emergent property of a collection of intertwined aims and constraints. I consider a disentangled agent that is formed by multiple and relatively independent components. Part of the resulting agent’s task is to present alternatives, or ‘fields of action’ to its component selves. Correspondingly, the composed agent is itself constrained by a field of action that the superstructure to which it belongs presents. Just as the original divided agents are modeled as units, the superstructure possesses a certain amount of cohesion, and can thus be ascribed agency; its independent parts could be consciously or evolutionally constructed and aligned. This hierarchical representation intends to reveal behavior as bounded and bounding, exemplified by an agent that is abstractly defined. The most important aspect of such an agent is that it maximizes its objective function by definition, given the constraints of the nature of its components and the superstructure to which it belongs. According to this proposition, suboptimal behavior is often misclassified because we do not recognize the actual maximizing active agent. The flexibility of this model can be used to describe groups or societies in interaction. It also allows us to understand experimental evidence that humans cooperate more then they should according to theories that define them as unitary. The theory to be developed would explain complex organization taking into account all aspects of subset reorganization, which depend on the particularities of the entity. This view must include a measure of group welfare beyond Pareto optimality, as well as definitions of the concepts of a behavioral function, optimal scales and design, bordered maximization, cohesion, and identification processes.
June 15, 2005	Joshua Thorp Explorations in Long Distance Wireless TIME: Wed June 15, 12:30p LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room ABSTRACT: This summer I am working on bringing wireless internet out to my parent's farm south of Madrid. La Cañada Wireless Association (LCWA) of Eldorado is an active wireless network association that my parents may be able to join. I have purchased some equipment to act as an Access Point (AP) at their neighbor's house (which has the best chance of picking up a signal from the LCWA network. I also have a friend who is working on the CUWiN project which is a community wireless project that is building a mesh approach to wireless networks. I will discuss my understanding of these two projects including CUWiN's eventual implementation of Hazy Sighted Link State (HSLS) Routing.
June 8, 2005	Jonathan Barker Fearful Asymmetry: Terror, Power, and the Shape of Popular Action AFFILIATION: Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Toronto TIME: Wed June 8, 12:30p LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room ABSTRACT: The deeper argument for participation holds that through participation in the decisions that affect their lives, people exercise and develop the best of themselves as full human and social beings. Participation takes further meaning from its potential for pushing social reforms that reduce injustices within and between societies. Today these positive qualities of participation are challenged by core features of globalization. Participation requires spaces in which equality of voices is recognized and protected, yet globally and in most economies and large-scale organizations inequality of social and economic power is on the rise. The most complete forms of participation take place in settings that make decisions for whole communities and encompass all the features of social life, yet power tends to become more fragmented and dispersed with the deliberative bodies losing power in relation to military machines, corporations, and administrative bureaucracies. New technologies of violence threaten participation from the mighty via bombs and security police, and from the margins via terrorist acts. New information technologies strengthen the strong, but also give new capacities to the weak. The fear inspired by terrorist acts and the so-called war on terrorism has skewed the field of action sharply in favor of the holders of economic and military power. Those who work for the deeper benefits of expanded participation in particular activities are well-placed to assess this new fearful asymmetry and to act against it. Many of the most committed and creative participatory initiatives are local, but their success is not assured by only local strengths. Local participation works best when it is linked to wider networks of technical and political knowledge, when it gains some support from higher political and administrative officials, and where basic political rights are protected by laws and customs. Spreading the benefits of participation under today’s conditions will require new kinds of settings joined in new kinds of networks. BIO: Jonathan Barker’s teaching, writing, and research have focused on issues of participation and political change in the developing world. His research on rural policy and politics in Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda shows how political action is related to a crisis of livelihood and complex survival strategies (Rural Communities under Stress: Peasant Farmers and the State in Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). He developed a conception of political settings that can be used in field research on grass roots political action. The ideas are explained and put to use in a series of case studies in India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Uganda, Nicaragua, the United States, and England he carried out in collaboration with graduate researchers. That work showed how people with little power and few resources often can create and use political space to defend their livelihoods and to assert their identities (Street-Level Democracy: Political Settings at the Margins of Global Power, Toronto: Between the Lines, 1999 and West Hartford, Connecticut: Kumarian Press, 1999.) Most recently he has tried to understand the ways popular political action is affected by terrorist acts and the war on terrorism (No-Nonsense Guide to Terrorism, Toronto, Between the Lines and the New Internationalist, 2003 and London: Verso, 2003). Jonathan Barker is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His email is jonathan.barker@utoronto.ca
June 1, 2005	James Stalker Regional Earth System Predictability Research (RESPR) Capabilities AFFILIATION: Regional Earth System Predictability Research, Inc. TIME: Wed June 1, 12:30p LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room ABSTRACT: At RESPR, our current focus has been to develop highly accurate model wind assessments and wind power forecasts for wind project developers and wind farm operators, respectively. We have developed many atmospheric model features and other software algorithms and cluster computing strategies to perform these computationally demanding fluid dynamical calculations very fast. Some of our atmospheric model project results will be discussed so the audience appreciates the product development aspects better. In this presentation, a concise overview of the research capabilities of RESPR will be given, including an overview on its parallel computational resources and on James Stalker’s professional background. Some thoughts on how fluid dynamics concepts may be applied to agent-based models (ABMs) will be presented. concepts may be applied to agent-based models (ABMs) will be presented.
April 22, 2005	TITLE: Chronocomplexity SPEAKER: Gus Koehler AFFILIATION: Time Structures (http://www.timestructures.com) LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room ABSTRACT: Virtually all political and economic actors talk continually in time-related terms. Tactics, long-term strategy, and happenstance merge as time and timing become the common denominators of policy making and economic strategy. Is there more than one temporality that needs to be taken into consideration in such circumstances? Is temporality the same across all temporal levels and scales and across an ecology, including its layers? But this begs fundamental questions such as: Is the direction of causality always from the present into the future for all temporalities? Or, do stochastic events have the same temporal characteristics as events that are not uniformly temporally distributed? Is the behavior space created by a thousand computer agents moving in computer time with only about ten different behaviors enough to demonstrate the temporal complexity of a living population? Perhaps it would more interesting to focus on the collective spatial-time flows of changing events as they continuously structurate the agent and its environment according to some sort of morphodynamics rules. In this approach there would be no entity; only process. The theologian and philosopher, St. Augustine nicely summarized our dilemma. "What is time? If no one asks me, I know but if I wanted to explain it to the one who asks me, I plainly do not know." I will present my recent research that proposes a way to answer these questions drawing on concepts from biology (time-ecology, heterochrony), physics (back-ground independent time) and dimensions, cognitive psychology, complex systems, and the extensive scholarly literature on time. My goal is to propos a problem that is so juicy that some of you might be interest in creating a new approach to autonomous agent simulation. This work received initial funding from NSF, has received a favorable review from the Advanced Technology Program, and is published in various academic journals.
October 26, 2004	Blair MacIntyre Design Exploration of Interactive Augmented Reality Affiliation: Georgia Institute of Technology: Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center Location: Tuesday, Oct 26th 12:15p-1:30 SFI Medium Conference Room. ABSTRACT: Applied Complexity developers are often tasked to visually present agent-based models back to organizations for validation and iterative refinement. I will discuss our work with Augmented and Mixed Reality (AR/MR). A major part of our work is understanding how to support new media designers during exploration and design of these complex, 3D experiences that mix physical and virtual worlds. This support has manifested itself in The Designer's Augmented Reality Toolkit (DART), a design environment for AR experience. Our work focuses on supporting early design activities, especially a rapid transition from storyboards to working experience, so that the experiential part of a design can be tested early and often. DART allows designers to specify complex relationships between the physical and virtual worlds, and supports 3D animatic actors (informal, sketch-based content) in addition to more polished content.
March 12, 2004	Aberto Donati Time Dependent Vehicle Routing Problem with a Multi Ant Colony System Affiliation: Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA) Location: 1:30-3p Santa Fe Institute Medium Conference Room http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/events/abstract/182 Abstract: The Time Dependent Vehicle Routing Problem, TDVRP, consists in optimally routing a fleet of vehicles of fixed capacity when travel times are time dependent, that is, they depend on the time when the trip originates. The speed distributions, from which the travel times can be calculated, are supposed to be known at the beginning of the optimization. This version of the VRP is motivated by the fact that in an urban context traffic conditions play an important role and can not be ignored in order to perform a feasible and realistic optimization. In fact when dealing with time constraints, like the delivery time windows for the customers, the optimal solutions known for the classic case become unfeasible and the degree of unfeasibility increases with the variability of traffic conditions, while on the other hand, if no time constraints are present, the classic solutions become suboptimal. The optimization consists in finding the solution that minimizes two objectives: the number of tours first and the total travel time. Since the total travel time of a tour depends, in the time dependent context, also on the time of the day the tour was initiated, an optimization procedure is also required to find the best starting times. The optimizations algorithms are all based on the Ant Colony System (ACS) that has been shown to be a suitable technique for the classic VRP. New local search procedures that allow searching for the feasible moves in constant time, are introduced. Relevant aspects of this model and various experiments are discussed, and finally the application of the model to a real context.
February 11, 2004	Roger Critchlow Why Johnny Can't Negotiate Location: 1:30-3p SFI Medium Conference Room http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/events/abstract/164 ABSTRACT: Diplomatic and other high stakes negotiations deserve some of the computational analysis lavished on automated multi-agent systems in the past few years. A negotiation should be a combinatoric search problem where negotiators search for the agreement which provides the greatest benefit to all parties. Positional negotiation strategies reduce a negotiation to a one-dimensional line search for the least cost concessions from initial positions. Negotiators, as practitioners of combinatoric search, should be aware of the computational issues that apply to search problems, namely the curse of dimensionality, the no free lunch theorems, and the consequences of bounded rationality. Knowing that the number of possible agreements in a negotiation might be greater than the number of seconds in a human life, knowing that there is no guaranteed better way of searching the possibilities than a random walk, and knowing that each step in the search will have a finite cost, one might conclude that we are doomed to failure, that as our disagreements grow in complexity we are fated to be buried by them. The key to crafting effective search strategies is to know the lay of the land. Knowing whether we are searching flatlands, rolling hills, or rugged badlands makes the difference between success and futility. The topography of negotiation is determined by the preferences of the negotiators. Understanding how negotiators determine their preferences in complex negotiations may allow us to elicit preferences in just enough detail to find good agreements, to design negotiation strategies which are optimal for the preferences, and to design implementation mechanisms which are least likely to be abandoned. And understanding how negotiators do determine their preferences may also lead us to better ways to determine preferences, ways which are more efficiently evaluated, more easily communicated, or more productively exploited to make negotiations work.
September 26, 2003	Frank Wimberly Experiments on the Accuracy of Algorithms for Inferring the Structure of Genetic Regulatory Networks from Microarray Expression Levels Location: 12:15p-1:30 SFI Medium Conference Room ABSTRACT: After reviewing theoretical reasons for doubting that statistical/machine learning methods can accurately infer gene regulatory networks from expression measures, we test 10 algorithms on simulated data from the sea urchin network, and on microarray data for yeast compared with recent experimental determinations of the regulatory network in the same yeast species. We find most algorithms are at chance for determining the existence of a regulatory connection between gene pairs, and the performance of better algorithms degrades as simulations become more realistic, in accord with theory. Paper Wimberly, F., Heiman, T., Ramsey, J., and Glymour, C. (2003) Experiments on the Accuracy of Algorithms for Inferring the Structure of Genetic Regulatory Networks from Microarray Expression Levels
August 22, 2003	Andy Wuensche Life-like Processes in Cellular Automata Location: 12:15p-2p SFI Medium Conference Room ABSTRACT: I will show a family of "Life"-like cellular automata rules with 3 values, which instantly self-organize random patterns into a variety of gliders, gliders-guns, spirals and many other complex interacting structures including self-reproduction. The rules are nearest neighbour and work on a hex, square and cubic grid. For more info see... This will be shown as a live demo in multi-value DDLab, where network elements can have up to 8 values (colours) instead of just 2 (0,1). All the binary DDLab functions and methods for cellular automata and random Boolean networks are now generalized for multi-value including basins of attraction. If time allows, I will demonstrate some other features of DDLab. See.. www.ddlab.com and the multivalue page
July 25, 2003	** note talk is in afternoon ** ** parking will be limited. Please carpool ** Michael Agar Bugs and Fieldwork: Ethnography and Agent-Based Modeling Affiliation: RedfishGroup Senior Research Scientist, Friends Social Research Center Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, College Park Location: 3:30pm-5pm SFI Medium Conference Room ABSTRACT: Ethnographic research, with its century of history in anthropology and sociology, is the only social research that assumes nonlinear dynamic systems, both as research process and research product. Artificial societies, a version of agent-based modeling, simplify and represent just those kinds of social worlds. What sort of conversation can this old mode of research and this new mode of modeling have with each other? First ethnography will be described, on the assumption that most will have had little experience with it. The argument will be that, if you were going to look at a situation with ABM goals in mind, ethnography is the way you’d do it. Next, an artificial society that demonstrates the strengths and pitfalls of tacking back and forth between ethnographic research and an ABM will be presented. (An earlier version is available in Complexity—“Drugmart: Heroin Epidemics as Complex Adaptive Systems,” 7 (5):44-52, 2002.) This model results from an NIH funded project to explain illicit drug epidemics. The model tries to explain epidemiologic incidence curves of illicit drug use as an emergent property of autonomous agent experiences and the stories they tell as a result. The argument will be that the ethnography/model link works, sort of. The “sort of” is the most interesting part and it will be explored. Finally, some ways that a conversation between ethnography and artificial societies can be mutually beneficial will be explored. For example, artificial societies need better validation. As another example, ethnographies need to solve the problem of the limited case study.
July 15, 2003	** note talk location at Agua Fria Offices** Rob Pecherer Representing Arbitrary Hierarchies and Lattices in Relational Databases. LOCATION: Conference room at 624 Agua Fria Street Offices TIME: Tuesday July 15 12:15p-1:30 (Pizza will be ordered. $5/person. Email stephen@redfish.com if interested) ABSTRACT: Since their introduction (1970), all relational databases have been built using exactly two structural forms for representating relationships. Each relies on foreign keys and the SQL join operation. The relational view of data is a tabular view, and while appropriate for many types of problem-solving, it is very awkward for others. Combined with the tabular view, the complexities of the join operation have acted as a significant deterrent to both data owners and programmers of ordinary skills with respect to database usage and applications development. A third structure for relationships has been discovered. The new structure is capable of representing all relationships realizable with the conventional representations plus several new types. It promises a richer capability for enterprise modelling and decision support. The new representation provides a method (the Method of Recursive Objects, or MRO) which enables an entirely new database paradigm that practically eliminates the SQL join operation and provides a natural hierarchical visualization in place of relational tables. This new method could change the way people view databases, with significant potential for broadening the base of qualified users and enabling new applications. Expansion of the market for database products would then be expected. The presentation will briefly touch on the technology, demonstrate a simple, working model, and describe some possible applications.
June 20, 2003	Nia and Eric Amazeen Dynamics of Perception, Action, and Cognition 12pm-2pm SFI Medium Conference Room Applied Complexity researchers and developers are often tasked to model an organization of one type or another. How an organization couples to and coordinates with its environment tends to be of central importance to the model designer. The research program of Ecological Psychology, a sub-discipline within Cognitive Science, may provide inspiration as it seeks to make explicit the informational properties of the agent-environment interaction. FriamGroup will host Nia and Eric Amazeen, two prominent researchers in the field of Ecological Psychology, for a dual lecture to introduce research in the field. Talk 1: 12-1pm The Ecology of Perceiving Eric Amazeen Cognitive Science Arizona State University ABSTRACT: A traditional assumption in the psychology of perception is that the information on our senses is impoverished and that computational mechanisms are necessary to construct a perception of our environment. Such an assumption, though, distances the perceptual experience from the environment. This interferes with the psychologist's ability to understand the meaningful connections between an individual's behavior and environment. An alternate approach, the Ecological Approach of James J. Gibson, will be presented. According to this approach, there is an abundance of information available on the senses and so the perceiver is in constant direct contact with their environment. The goal of the psychologist is to identify this information. This approach will be illustrated with research on the perception of heaviness. Talk 2: 1-2pm The Dynamics of Rhythmic Coordination Polemnia Amazeen Cognitive Science Arizona State University ABSTRACT: Coordination is a multi-level, multi-agent, and naturally important phenomenon. An emphasis on behavior over physical composition allows for the examination of structurally-different coordination phenomena in a single, unified model. This talk will include an overview of both motor coordination and locomotor-respiratory coupling, or the support of motor coordination by respiration. Whether the component subsystems are limbs or entire physiological subsystems, their coordination may be characterized in terms of phase-locking and frequency-locking. Two classes of dynamical models will be presented that accommodate both phase-locked and frequency-locked coordination. In either case, the dynamical model is defined according to natural coordination tendencies and is parameterized by environmental factors, psychological influences, and experience. Universalities, applications, and future directions will be discussed.
May 30, 2003	Belinda Wong-Swanson Innov8 LLC Topic: Thermodynamic Availability in Complex Systems 12:15pm-1:30 Redfish Conference Room Slides - Powerpoint (~600k) HTML version ABSTRACT: Energy Availability (also known as Exergy) analysis has been used for over 30 years to improve the operational performance of power plants and industrial processes. I am currently conducting research to explore the feasibility of combining concepts and techniques in complexity science (such as, distributed agents, self-organization, adaptation, agent-based modeling), with energy availability analysis, as a tool for evaluating the interactions of different human activities, resource usage, environmental and economic impact. Typical energy availability of power plants would examine the input and output flows of the power plant, the different systems within the power plants, in order to reduce the amount of energy wasted. I would like to extend the system analysis boundary to include human activities near the power plant, and look at the input and output streams of each, and identify ways to optimally couple the activities such that output streams from one activity may be input streams to others, in order to utilize as close to the thermodynamic limit of available energy as possible. Agenda: motivation for the investigation brief review of the 1st & 2nd of Thermodynamics energy availability overview case study comparing difference between energy efficiency and energy availability efficiency literature search of research that combined energy availability & complexity my research proposal comments & suggestions from audience References: Kay. J. Ecosystems as self-organizing holarchic open systems: Narratives and the second law of thermodynamics Wall. G. Conditions and tools in the design of energy conversion and management systems of sustainable society
April 18, 2003	Owen Densmore Backspaces.net Topic: Agent-Based Modeling, GIS and Cities Slides - Macintosh Keynote output to PDF (2.8mb) Agent-Based Modeling Web Tutorial (Netlogo and Repast)
March 13, 2003	Stuart Kauffman Topic: Autonomous Agents QuickTime Movies and MP3s Video shot at relatively high contrast. Audio is decent. Video streams well in Netscape. May not stream in IE. For best results, load the URL's below directly in Quicktime Player and zoom to full screen. Movie Part 1 - 18 min 8 sec (16.3MB) Movie Part 2 - 19 min 41sec (17.6MB) Movie Part 3 - 20 min 4 sec (17.0MB) MP3 Part 1 - 18 min 8 sec (21.3MB) MP3 Part 2 - 19 min 41sec (23.5MB) MP3 Part 3 - 20 min 4 sec (23.0MB) Stu gave a similar version of this talk at at Rice University in April, 2002. Check this online version out for higher quality video.

 

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Stephen Guerin
office: (505)995-0206
email: stephen.guerin@redfish.com