Sciber

"Alan Turing, born a century ago this year, is best known for his wartime code-breaking and for inventing the 'Turing machine' – the concept at the heart of every computer today. But his legacy extends much further: he founded the field of artificial intelligence, proposed a theory of biological pattern formation and speculated about the limits of computation in physics. In this collection of features and opinion pieces, Nature celebrates the mind that, in a handful of papers over a tragically short lifetime, shaped many of the hottest fields in science today." Special feature @ Nature News Special : Alan Turing at 100

Melanie Mitchell's blog withe perspectives on the sciences of complexity: Exploring Complexity

"We estimated the world’s technological capacity to store, communicate, and compute information, tracking 60 analog and digital technologies during the period from 1986 to 2007." Full article @ Science

Networks move scientific discovery forward at the speed of light. Full article @ Innovations R Us - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences

"Hamilton’s rule states that cooperation will evolve if the fitness cost to actors is less than the benefit to recipients multiplied by their genetic relatedness. This rule makes many simplifying assumptions, however, and does not accurately describe social evolution in organisms such as microbes where selection is both strong and nonadditive. We derived a generalization of Hamilton’s rule and measured its parameters in Myxococcus xanthus bacteria. Nonadditivity made cooperative sporulation remarkably resistant to exploitation by cheater strains. Selection was driven by higher-order moments of population structure, not relatedness. These results provide an empirically testable cooperation principle applicable to both microbes and multicellular organisms and show how nonlinear interactions among cells insulate bacteria against cheaters." Full article @ Science

Awesome recommendation from Cosma Shalizi: Special Demi-Issues on Network Data Analysis in <cite>Annals of Applied Statistics</cite>

"Network science is an interdisciplinary endeavor, with methods and applications drawn from across the natural, social, and information sciences. A prominent problem in network science is the algorithmic detection of tightly connected groups of nodes known as communities. We developed a generalized framework of network quality functions that allowed us to study the community structure of arbitrary multislice networks, which are combinations of individual networks coupled through links that connect each node in one network slice to itself in other slices. This framework allows studies of community structure in a general setting encompassing networks that evolve over time, have multiple types of links (multiplexity), and have multiple scales. Full article @ Science

"My goal in building this project was to create a machine that embodied the classic look and feel of the machine presented in Turing’s paper. I wanted to build a machine that would be immediately recognizable as a Turing machine to someone familiar with Turing's work.
"A Turing Machine Overview

"Statisticians can reuse their data to quantify the uncertainty of complex models." Full article by Cosma Shalizi @ The American Scientist

"A study of failures in interconnected networks highlights the vulnerability of tightly coupled infrastructures and shows the need to consider mutually dependent network properties in designing resilient systems". Full article @ Nature

"Push, shout, or politely excuse yourself all you want, but those slowpokes in your way just won't budge. A new study shows a long-neglected reason why: Up to 70% of people in crowds socially glue themselves into groups of two or more, slowing down traffic. What's worse, as crowds gets denser, groups bend into anti-aerodynamic shapes that exacerbate the problem." Full news report @ ScienceNOW.

Full Article:

Moussaïd M, Perozo N, Garnier S, Helbing D, Theraulaz G [2010]. "The Walking Behaviour of Pedestrian Social Groups and Its Impact on Crowd Dynamics". PLoS ONE 5(4): e10047.

Labels: complexity, modeling

"Something important is changing in how we as a society use computers to mine data. In the past decade, machine-learning algorithms have helped to analyze historical data, often revealing trends and patterns too subtle for humans to detect. Examples include mining credit card data to discover activity patterns that suggest fraud, and mining scientific data to discover new empirical laws (1, 2). Researchers are beginning to apply these algorithms to real-time data that record personal activities, conversations, and movements (3–8) in an attempt to improve human health, guide traffic, and advance the scientific understanding of human behavior." Full perspective @ Science Magazine.

Labels: data mining, human behavior

"Cybernetics is one of the most widely misunderstood concepts. The word itself seems sinister and futuristic, but the term has ancient roots – the Greek word kybernetes, meaning steersman. Cybernetics was famously defined in more recent times by Norbert Wiener in 1948, as the science of “control and communication, in the animal and the machine.” Words like "control” may seem to have creepy overtones, but at its heart, cybernetics is simply the study of systems. "Cybernetics is the discipline of whole systems thinking...a whole system is a living system is a learning system," as Stewart Brand put it in 1980. Cybernetic systems have been used to model all kinds of phenomena, with varying degrees of success – factories, societies, machines, ecosystems, brains -- and many noted artists and musicians derived inspiration from this powerful conceptual toolkit. Cybernetics may be one of the most interdisciplinary frameworks ever devised; its theories link engineering, math, physics, biology, psychology, and an array of other fields, and ideas from cybernetics inevitably infiltrated the arts. The musician and producer Brian Eno, for example, was a big fan of connecting ideas from cybernetics to the studio environment, and to music composition, in his work in the 1970s."

Full article @ Rhizone.



P.S. Thanks Artemy for sending this!

Labels: art, cybernetics

"R is also the name of a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models." Full Story @ NYTimes.com

Lecture 9

The Year Online:The business of social networking, cloud computing, and a flaw in the fabric of the Internet top the most notable stories of 2008. Full story @ Technology Review: The Year Online

The Year Online:The business of social networking, cloud computing, and a flaw in the fabric of the Internet top the most notable stories of 2008. Full story @ Technology Review: The Year Online

Lecture 8 - The Cyborg Species

Labels: cyborgs

The World’s Premier Student Technology Competition: Imagine Cup Student Competition 2009. Looks especially at the Information Technology Competition.



Everything that the world may become "someday" lies in the hands of young people today. As they look at the road ahead, their close relationship with technology enables them to dream in ways we never have before. Put the two together, and you have young minds holding the tools that can make their vision a reality.

This is the recipe that inspired Microsoft to create the Imagine Cup. What begins with a burst of inspiration and a lot of hard work can become a future software breakthrough, a future career, or a flourishing new industry. The Imagine Cup encourages young people to apply their imagination, their passion and their creativity to technology innovations that can make a difference in the world – today. Now in its sixth year, the Imagine Cup has grown to be a truly global competition focused on finding solutions to real world issues.

Open to students around the world, the Imagine Cup is a serious challenge that draws serious talent, and the competition is intense. The contest spans a year, beginning with local, regional and online contests whose winners go on to attend the global finals held in a different location every year. The intensity of the work brings students together, and motivates the competitors to give it their all. The bonds formed here often last well beyond the competition itself.

List of CDI Awards

Labels: CDI, grants

Is this the future of Human-Computer Interaction?

Labels: cyborgs

Animals using tools:

Crow and Wire
Capuchin Monkeys (Windows Media).
More about Tool Use in Animals.

Opaque Technology

List of bad designs.
Design Guru Donald Norman and his publications.

Towards portable knowledge technology

Google SMS, here is the Manual. And what about Google in your Brain? It is coming soon.

Cyborgs in Movies

Blade Runner

Ubiquitous computing

Smart Shopping
Mark Weiser
Tokyo RFID Map. More details at InfoWorld.
social dynamics and coordinated human activity

Labels: cyborgs, technology, tools

"A company called Luminex has hit on the idea of weaving fibre-optics into fabric, so the wearer can really light up a room when they enter it." Full article at BBC News.

Labels: cyborgs, intelligent fabrics, technology, tools

"Kiss your keyboard goodbye: Soon we'll jack our brains directly into the Net - and that's just the beginning". Full Story at CNNMoney.com: Future Boy: This is your brain on Google

Labels: cyborgs, human intelligence, mobile, technology

A host of new sites, including Totspot, Odadeo, Lil’Grams and Kidmondo, offer parents a chance to invite friends and family to join and contribute to a network geared to connecting them to the baby in their lives. Full story @ NYTimes.com

Labels: children, networking

Lecture 7 - Modeling the World

Labels: modeling, robots

Wikipedia Visualizations and Emergent Mosaic of Wikipedian Activity

Language evolved as part of a uniquely human group of traits, the interdependence of which calls for an integrated approach to the study of brain function, argue Eörs Szathmáry and Szabolcs Számadó. Full article @ Nature

Turing Machine Simulator 1
Turing Machine Simulator 2
Pi the Movie

The Antikythera Mechanism
Interactive Relighting of the Antikythera Mechanism
Story @ BBC News
The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project

Fibonacci Sequence

• Fibonacci numbers in Nature. The Romanesco Vegetable.
  
• Fibonacci Spiral
  
• Fibonacci Music
  
• Fibonacci Waltz

A good description of L-Systems by Chris Jennings

Labels: modeling

"If handled appropriately, data about Internet-based communication and interactivity could revolutionize our understanding of collective human behaviour". Full essay @A twenty-first century science : Article : Nature

Labels: data, modeling

Bettencourt, L.M.A., J.Lobo, D. Helbing, C. Kühnert, and G.B. West [2007] "Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities.", PNAS 104(17), 7301-7306

T. Helikar, J. Konvalina, J. Heidel, and J.A. Rogers [2008] "Emergent decision-making in biological signal transduction networks.", PNAS. 105(6): 1913-1918

J. Lewis [2008] "From Signals to Patterns: Space, Time, and Mathematics in Developmental Biology.", Science. 322(5900): 399-403

Lecture 6 - Complexity

Labels: complexity

A team engineers microbes to perform AND, OR, NAND and NOR logic operations. Full story @Science News

Hanoi Towers with 3 Disks

Hanoi Tower Applet

Labels: evolution, technology

Adrian German over in Computer Science has organized what looks to be a fascinating conference, Midwest NKS 2008, that will be taking place this weekend, starting on Friday. There is an amazing array of speakers, either live or by videoconference, including Gregory Chaitin, David Deutsch, Ed Fredkin, Sir Anthony J. Legget, Charles Bennett, Stephen Wolfram, and more.

The theme of the conference is "What is Computation? How Does Nature Compute?". There will be talks on the physics of information, quantum computation, cellular automata (of course; NKS == Wolfram's New Kind of Science), and, generally, the nature of reality and computability.

Though there are some lunches and dinners that require paid registration, everything else is FREE, including all of the lectures and the coffee, donuts, and other refreshments. Events start at 8:30am Friday 10/31 and run until Sunday 11/2 at 12:15pm.

Full schedule and additional info

Lecture 5 - Information and Uncertainty

Labels: information, uncertainty

"In a boost to the field of synthetic biology, researchers have created an RNA-based device that can control gene expression of target genes, thus regulating molecular processes in living cells, a paper in this week's Science reports. " Full story @ The Scientist

As discussed in class, new deadline is midnight on October 17th.

Labels: assignment

Read the Jorge Luis Borges's Library of Babel, an optional readinf about information and meaning.

Labels: information

"How studying biological interactions and evolution yields techniques for predicting the outcome of complex interactions". By John Holland @ The Scientist

Labels: biology, complexity