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Happy New Year from The ASSYST team

Happy New Year !

his is the wish of the ASSYST team. And to start

in a good mood, we present in this newsletter a

synthesis of the reports from ECCS!11 bursaries

winners. Most bursary recipients did appreciate the

conference, and will probably try to attend ECCS!12 that,

as you know, will be held in Brussels next September.

Don!t forget that the deadline for proposing a satellite meeting for ECCS!12 is already on the 6th of January!

This issue of the ASSYST/CSS newsletter proposes

taking a close look to some interesting events that our

community will organise during this new year: starting by

the “ASSYST Workshop on Mathematics for the

Dynamics of Multilevel Systems”, that will be held at the

European Centre for Living Technology, Venice, 26th -

28th February (see the call for participation on page 3);

the “1st Annual Conference on Complexity and Human

Experience”, a conference focusing on humanities and

social sciences, from the 30th of May to the 1st June at

The University of North Carolina; the “Heron Island

Complex Systems Summer School”, at the University of

Sydney, from the 16th to the 27th January; and the new

research project “EveryAware - Enhance environmental

awareness through social information technologies” (see description and link page 5).

Finally, we call your attention to two videos recently

available at the ASSYST Digital Library: “Buble Truble”,

a TED presentation by Tobias Preis, and “The

endogenous dynamics of markets: price impact and

feedback loops” by Jean-Philippe Bouchaud. Sign of

the times we are living, complex systems research is being called to help facing economic crisis.

As usual, you will be able to find conference and jobs announcements, and the essential Reading Snippets.

Enjoy!

-- The ASSYST Team

T

Number 26, January 2012 | www.assystcomplexity.eu | www.cssociety.org

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Reports from ECCS’11 Bursaries Winners by Jane Bromley

ne of the work packages of ASSYST is for the

provision of conference support and, in particular,

to attempt to increase variety in the CS community

by supporting female scientists and minority groups. This

year we provided 32 bursaries for people to attend

ECCS!11. The bursaries provided limited contributions

towards the conference fee and/or travel expenses for

female scientists, young researchers, and others who

would otherwise be unable to attend ECCS'11. There

were also a number of conditions for receiving the

bursary, one of which was to provide feedback about how they had benefitted from attending the conference.

You can read the full reports at http://www.assystcomplexity.eu/news.jsp?article=82

The bursaries were given to people from all over the

world: from Europe, which was well represented, to North

Africa, the Philippines, Iran, Russia, Ukraine, India and

South America. This shows how international the

conference has become in the eight years of its

existence. Those supported ranged from young people

just starting in their research career, to others well along

the way, but from isolated locations, and slightly under half were female.

Most bursary recipients were very positive about

attending the conference – they found it well organized,

liked the location, and enjoyed meeting people from all

over the world. They found the whole event inspiring (the

most useful thing since starting their PhD as one person

said) and many commented that they had never learnt so

much in one week. In particular the chances to discuss

their research with the community, to receive feedback

and attend tutorials, were all seen as key in their future

work. Many commented that they would not have been

able to attend without the help from the bursary and were

very grateful. Another aspect of the conference that was

appreciated was its interdisciplinary nature and the

chance to see the state of the art in the whole field. Many

were very happy to have had the opportunity to meet

relevant personalities in their field, to attend a lecture by a

Nobel Prize winner, and in general the opportunity to

learn from leading scientists in the field. Many mentioned

the Young Researcher Network supported by FuturICT as

very beneficial. They made friends and developed future

cooperation. Some used the time to network and look for post-doctoral positions.

The negatives were restricted to things like finding the

parallel sessions meant they couldn!t attend all they

wanted or wishing to hear talks about Complex Systems from a philosophical point of view.

Some had found the review process frustrating and didn!t

like the use of just short abstracts for selecting

contributions. Finally someone noted the need for a

cross-disciplinary education for Complex Systems scientists – which Etoile is seeking to address.

web: http://www.assystcomplexity.eu/

ECCS’12 - Call for organizing satellite meetings

ECCS'12 will be a major international event in the area of complex systems and related topics. It

will offer unique opportunities to present novel scientific approaches and to review potential

applications. Two days of the conference, 5 and 6 September, are reserved for satellite meetings. Applications to organize a satellite meeting can now be submitted via email.

Prospective organizers are invited to submit an informal proposal (less than 1000 words) by email

to info@eccs2012.eu with subject line 'Satellite proposal'. In the message header, please specify

the satellite title, as well as the names and institutions of the members of the organizing committee.

The deadline for applications for satellite meetings is January 6 2012. Official notification of

acceptance will be sent on 4 February 2012 at the latest.

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Call for Participation

ASSYST Workshop on Mathematics for the Dynamics of Multilevel Systems European Centre for Living Technology, Venice, 26th - 28th February 2012

ollowing highly successful meetings on Mathematics in the Science of Complex Systems at ECLT in Venice and

Warwick University in February and June 2011, we are holding the meeting Mathematics for the Dynamics of

Multilevel Systems in February 2012. This meeting takes place in the context of the recent DYM-CS call from

FET (http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/fet-proactive/dymcs_en.html). That call closes in January 2012. Our meeting will

give an opportunity for those who have participated in this call to share their ideas before the evaluations, and it aims to

create a collaborative context for the projects which are selected for funding. There is no conference fee and

accommodation, meals and some travel support will be provided. Attendance is strictly limited. Anyone wishing to

attend this meeting should contact j.m.bromley@open.ac.uk saying briefly their interest in the meaning and why they

should be allocated a place. Places will be allocated on the basis of engagement with the DYM-CS programme and/or

individuals having a clear contribution to make to the DYM-CS community. We expect to be oversubscribed and apologise in advance that we cannot accept everyone on this occasion.

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1st Annual Conference on Complexity and Human Experience

May 30th - June 1st, 2012 The University of North Carolina

he recent increase in the number of formal

institutes and conferences dedicated to

complexity theory and its application is evidence

that complexity science has arrived and is realizing its

potential to cut across almost every academic

discipline. Research projects centered on complex

adaptive systems in the natural (physics, chemistry,

biology, etc.) and social sciences (economics, political

science, anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc.),

along with novel applications in engineering, computer

science, robotics, and, more recently, the arts and the

humanities (archaeology, art history, history, literature,

philosophy, performance art, religion, etc.), have

already earned some recognition in the field of complexity science.

In light of these developments, the Complex Systems

Institute and the Center for Advanced Research in the

Humanities at UNC Charlotte will inaugurate an annual conference series, beginning in 2012, dedicated to complexity

with particular application to understanding the intricacies of human experience across all domains. The goal of the

series is to provide a trans-disciplinary venue for scholars from the humanities and the social sciences, as well as

some aspects of the natural sciences (such as neuroscience, pharmacology, etc.). Since matters of life and death

pertain to human experience in profound and important ways, the conference hopes to attract representatives from the allied health sciences as well.

Web: http://sites.google.com/site/humancomplexity2012/

Heron Island Complex Systems Summer School 2012

January 16 to 27, 2012

usiness is arguably the human enterprise that

drives our use (and abuse) of natural resources

more than any other activity. Business and the

biosphere are therefore two complex systems intricately

linked. Achieving global sustainability thus requires

understanding the complex structure and dynamics of

"coupled business and biological systems" and

particularly developing tools to analyse their

interconnectivity across multiple scales of space, time and

organisation... This leads us away from disciplinary

models of isolated systems to the development of

integrated regional models right up to modelling the whole

earth system. Our summer school will explore new

advances and techniques that can be applied to model

coupled business and biological systems from local to global scales.

Web: http://sydney.edu.au/business/research/complexity/events/heron_island_summer_school_2012

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EveryAware - Enhance environmental awareness through social information technologies

Project coordinated by Fondazione Istituto per l'Interscambio Scientifico, Italy

7th Framework programme – STREP 2011 - 2014

here is now overwhelming

evidence that the current

organisation of our

economies and societies is

seriously damaging biological

ecosystems and human living

conditions in the very short term,

with potentially catastrophic effects

in the long term. The enforcement

of novel policies may be triggered

by a grassroot approach, with a key contribution from information and communication technologies (ICT). Nowadays

low-cost sensing technologies allow the citizens to directly assess the state of the environment; social networking tools

allow effective data and opinion collection and real-time information spreading processes. In addition, theoretical and

modeling tools developed by physicists, computer scientists and sociologists have reached the maturity to analyse,

interpret and visualize complex data sets. The proposed project intends to integrate all crucial phases (environmental

monitoring, awareness enhancement, behavioural change) in the management of the environment in a unified

framework, by creating a new technological platform combining sensing technologies, networking applications and

data-processing tools; the Internet and the existing mobile communication networks will provide the infrastructure

hosting such a platform, allowing its replication in different times and places. Case studies concerning different

numbers of participants will test the scalability of the platform, aiming at involving as many citizens as possible

leveraging on the low cost and high usability of the sensing devices. The integration of participatory sensing with the

monitoring of subjective opinions is novel and crucial, as it exposes the mechanisms by which the local perception of

an environmental issue, corroborated by quantitative data, evolves into socially-shared opinions, eventually driving

behavioural changes. Enabling this level of transparency critically allows an effective communication of desirable environmental strategies to the general public and to institutional agencies.

Web: http://www.everyaware.eu/

Conferences http://www.assystcomplexity.eu/conferences.jsp

HICSSS 2012 Heron Island Complex Systems Summer

School 2012

Heron Island, Australia

16 Jan 2012 to 27 Jan 2012

ICAART 2012 4th International Conference on Agents and

Artificial Intelligence

Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal

6 Feb 2012 to 8 Feb 2012

ComplexNet 2012 3rd Workshop on Complex Networks

Melbourne, Florida, USA

7 Mar 2012 to 9 Mar 2012

IWSOS 2012

Sixth International Workshop on Self-

Organizing Systems

Delft, The Netherlands

15 Mar 2012 to 16 Mar 2012

INSC 2012 5th International Nonlinear Science Conference

2012

Barcelona, Spain

15 Mar 2012 to 17 Mar 2012

SESOC2012 4th International Workshop on Security and

Online Social Networks

Lugano, Switzerland

19 Mar 2012 to 19 Mar 2012

Evostar 2012 Evostar 2012

University of Málaga

11 Apr 2012 to 13 Apr 2012

CI2012

Collective Intelligence 2012

MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

18 Apr 2012 to 20 Apr 2012

ISCRAM2012 The 9th International Conference on

Information Systems for Crisis Response and

Management

Vancouver, Canada

22 Apr 2012 to 25 Apr 2012

SDM 12 The Twelfth SIAM International Conference on

Data Mining

Anaheim, California, USA

26 Apr 2012 to 28 Apr 2012

ICECCS2012 17th IEEE International Conference on

Engineering of Complex Computer Systems

Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris - France

18 Jul 2012 to 20 Jul 2012

ECCS12 European Conference on Complex Systems

2012

Université Libre de Bruxelles

3 Sep 2012 to 7 Sep 2012

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ASSYST Video Library

The dynamics of markets http://www.assystcomplexity.eu/video.jsp?collection=The%20dynamics%20of%20markets

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Bubble Trouble

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When a stock market rises unsustainably, it can create a

financial bubble that sooner or later will burst. Tobias

Preis explains whether concepts from physics can be

used to create a law describing exactly how such crashes occur.

Tobias Preis is a scientist and founder of Artemis Capital

Asset Management. He performed complex systems

research at Boston University and ETH Zurich. He was

awarded a Ph.D. in physics and is a member of the

Gutenberg Academy. His current research focuses on

quantifying and modeling financial market fluctuations.

Recently, he headed a research team which provided

evidence that search engine query data and stock market fluctuations are correlated.

Web: tobiaspreis.de

Twitter: @t_preis

The endogenous dynamics of markets: price impact and feedback loops

!

“The endogenous dynamics of markets: price impact and

feedback loops” was presented by Jean-Philippe

Bouchaud (Capital Fund Management, ESPCI Paris

Tech, Ecole Polytechnique) at FET!11 - The European

Future Technologies Conference and Exhibition - Science

beyond fiction, a conference held in Budapest, May 4 – 6,

2011. The presentation is available at the FET!11 website.

Abstract: “We review the evidence that the erratic

dynamics of markets is to a large extent of endogenous

origin, i.e. determined by the trading activity itself and not

due to the rational processing of exogenous news. In

order to understand why and how prices move, the joint

fluctuations of order flow and liquidity – and the way these

impact prices – become the keyingredients. Impact is

necessary for private information to be reflected in prices,

but by the same token, random fluctuations in order flow

necessarily contribute to the volatility of markets. Our

thesis is that the latter contribution is in fact dominant,

resulting in a decoupling between prices and fundamental

values, at least on short to medium time scales. We

argue that markets operate in a regime of vanishing

revealed liquidity, but large latent liquidity, which would

explain their hyper-sensitivity to fluctuations. More

precisely, we identify a dangerous feedback loop between

bid-ask spread and volatility that may lead to

microliquidity crises and price jumps. We discuss several

other unstable feedback loops that should be relevant to

account for market crises: imitation, unwarranted quantitative models, pro-cyclical regulation, etc.”

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Jobs

http://jobs.cssociety.org

Professor Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Complex

Systems

University of Alaska Anchorage

United States - Sun 01 of Jan., 2012

Postdoc Post-doc Bio-economic modelling for scenarios of biodiversity

and forestry facing climate change

CNRS

France - Sun 01 of Jan., 2012

Postodc/Lecturer Postdoc and Doctoral Scholarship at the Leo Apostel Center for

Interdisciplinary Studies

Leo Apostel Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies Brussels Free

University Belgium - Sat 07 of Jan., 2012

PhD Two Marie Curie PhD positions in computational systems

biology

BioProcess Engineering Group Instituto de Investigaciones

Marinas (C.S.I.C.) Spanish Council for Scientific Research

C/Eduardo Cabello 6 36208 Vigo

Spain - Thu 01 of Mar., 2012

Teaching/Research Assistant Maitre de Conférences en Physique Statistique des Systèmes

Complexes

CPT, Université d'Aix-Marseille

France - Sun 01 of Apr., 2012

Postdoc/Lecturer Theoretical understanding of multi-scale dynamics of brain

networks

Italian National Institute for Nuclear Research

Italy - Sat 01 of Dec., 2012

UCD Research Fellow (2 yrs)

Prof. Dr. Petra Ahrweiler

Innovation Research Unit – UCD Dublin http://casl.ucd.ie/iru/

University College Dublin,

Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland

Contributors to this edition:

Jane Bromley, Jeff Johnson, Jorge Louçã, and David MS Rodrigues.

5/.*%!08R29009.;!?89K'>9;'0U!!

If you are a Complex System researcher/practitioner and want to

share a success story about your work / research please submit

it to newsletter@assystcomplexity.eu.

The story should approximately 500 words (if you want to submit

an extended story please contact us) and should be sent in TXT,

ODT, RTF or DOC file formats.

Contacts

A55)5B!=!AF/9.;!1.*!/D'!5F9';F'!.1!F.2$>'J!

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Web: http://assystcomplexity.eu

RSS: http://assystcomplexity.eu/rss.xml

Twitter: http://twitter.com/assystcomplex

FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/assystcomplex Email: newsletter@assystcomplexity.eu

Feedback: http://assystcomplexity.ideascale.com/

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Web: http://cssociety.org

RSS: http://cssociety.org/tiki-calendars_rss.php Suggestions: http://cssociety.org/suggestions

The ASSYST project acknowledges the financial support of the

Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) programme within

the ICT theme of the Seventh Framework Programme for Research of the European Commission.

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Reading Snippets

The network takeover

Reductionism, as a paradigm, is expired, and complexity,

as a field, is tired. Data-based mathematical models of

complex systems are offering a fresh perspective, rapidly

developing into a new discipline: network science.

In Nature http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v8/n1/full/nphys2188.html

António Damásio: The quest to understand consciousness Every morning we wake up and regain consciousness --

that is a marvelous fact -- but what exactly is it that we

regain? Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio uses this simple

question to give us a glimpse into how our brains create

our sense of self.

In Ted http://www.ted.com/talks/antonio_damasio_the_quest_to_understand_co

nsciousness.html

Detecting Novel Associations in Large Data Sets Identifying interesting relationships between pairs of

variables in large data sets is increasingly important. Here,

we present a measure of dependence for two-variable

relationships: the maximal information coefficient (MIC).

MIC captures a wide range of associations both functional

and not, and for functional relationships provides a score

that roughly equals the coefficient of determination (R2) of

the data relative to the regression function. MIC belongs to

a larger class of maximal information-based

nonparametric exploration (MINE) statistics for identifying

and classifying relationships. We apply MIC and MINE to

data sets in global health, gene expression, major-league

baseball, and the human gut microbiota and identify

known and novel relationships.

In Science http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6062/1518

LHC reports discovery of its first new particle Prof Paul Newman, from the University of Birmingham,

added: "This is the first time such a new particle has been

found at the LHC. Its discovery is a testament to the very

successful running of the collider in 2011 and to the

superb understanding of our detector which has been

achieved by the Atlas collaboration already." In BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16301908

First 'Earth-Size Planets Beyond Our Solar System' Discovered Scientists have found two Earth-sized planets orbiting a

star outside the solar system, an encouraging sign for prospects of finding life elsewhere.

The discovery shows that such planets exist and that they

can be detected by the Kepler spacecraft, said Francois

Fressin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for

Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. They're the smallest planets found so far that orbit a star resembling our sun.

Scientists are seeking Earth-sized planets as potential

homes for extraterrestrial life, said Fressin, who reports

the new findings in a paper published online Tuesday by

the journal Nature. One planet's diameter is only 3 percent

larger than Earth's, while the other's diameter is about

nine-tenths that of Earth. They appear to be rocky, like our planet.

In NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=144020758

Flavor network and the principles of food pairing

!

The cultural diversity of culinary practice, as illustrated by

the variety of regional cuisines, raises the question of

whether there are any general patterns that determine the

ingredient combinations used in food today or principles

that transcend individual tastes and recipes. We introduce

a flavor network that captures the flavor compounds

shared by culinary ingredients. Western cuisines show a

tendency to use ingredient pairs that share many flavor

compounds, supporting the so-called food pairing

hypothesis. By contrast, East Asian cuisines tend to avoid

compound sharing ingredients. Given the increasing

availability of information on food preparation, our data-

driven investigation opens new avenues towards a systematic understanding of culinary practice.

In Nature: http://www.nature.com/srep/2011/111215/srep00196/full/srep00196.html