The natural connectivity of autonomous systems

The principle of biological autonomy, introduced by Francisco J. Varela, addresses the dilemma of Cartesian mind-body dualism by re-casting mind and body, or subject and object, observer and observed, not as irreconcilable categories, but as complementary perspectives on the same biological phenomena. Indeed, this distinction between self and non-self may be seen as a necessary precondition for autonomy. An autonomous system is self-governing in that it is concerned with preserving its unique character, or unity. Furthermore, an autonomous system is operationally closed in that it forms a self-referential network without reference to an external world. This paper develops these ideas in relation to thinking about embodied, enactive robotics. As well as being constructed artefacts, what is it to look at robots as truly autonomous agents? In this context we begin to explore the concept of operational closure analytically. We utilise natural connectivity as a quantitative measure of the cyclicity of these operationally closed internal processes. In doing so we discover that increased natural connectivity of an autonomous system confers a greater behavioural robustness when it is coupled with the external world

2016 IMSAloquium, Student Investigation Showcase

Welcome to the twenty-eighth year of the Student Inquiry and Research Program (SIR)! This is a program that is as old as IMSA. The SIR program represents our unending dedication to enabling our students to learn what it is to be an innovator and to make contributions to what is known on Earth.https://digitalcommons.imsa.edu/archives_sir/1026/thumbnail.jp

Inductive Pattern Formation

With the extended computational limits of algorithmic recursion, scientific investigation is transitioning away from computationally decidable problems and beginning to address computationally undecidable complexity. The analysis of deductive inference in structure-property models are yielding to the synthesis of inductive inference in process-structure simulations. Process-structure modeling has examined external order parameters of inductive pattern formation, but investigation of the internal order parameters of self-organization have been hampered by the lack of a mathematical formalism with the ability to quantitatively define a specific configuration of points. This investigation addressed this issue of quantitative synthesis. Local space was developed by the Poincare inflation of a set of points to construct neighborhood intersections, defining topological distance and introducing situated Boolean topology as a local replacement for point-set topology. Parallel development of the local semi-metric topological space, the local semi-metric probability space, and the local metric space of a set of points provides a triangulation of connectivity measures to define the quantitative architectural identity of a configuration and structure independent axes of a structural configuration space. The recursive sequence of intersections constructs a probabilistic discrete spacetime model of interacting fields to define the internal order parameters of self-organization, with order parameters external to the configuration modeled by adjusting the morphological parameters of individual neighborhoods and the interplay of excitatory and inhibitory point sets. The evolutionary trajectory of a configuration maps the development of specific hierarchical structure that is emergent from a specific set of initial conditions, with nested boundaries signaling the nonlinear properties of local causative configurations. This exploration of architectural configuration space concluded with initial process-structure-property models of deductive and inductive inference spaces. In the computationally undecidable problem of human niche construction, an adaptive-inductive pattern formation model with predictive control organized the bipartite recursion between an information structure and its physical expression as hierarchical ensembles of artificial neural network-like structures. The union of architectural identity and bipartite recursion generates a predictive structural model of an evolutionary design process, offering an alternative to the limitations of cognitive descriptive modeling. The low computational complexity of these models enable them to be embedded in physical constructions to create the artificial life forms of a real-time autonomously adaptive human habitat

Modeling and Simulation of Polymerization Processes

This reprint is a compilation of nine papers published in Processes, in a Special Issue on “Modeling and Simulation of Polymerization Processes”. It aimed to address both new findings on basic topics and the modeling of the emerging aspects of product design and polymerization processes. It provides a nice view of the state of the art with regard to the modeling and simulation of polymerization processes. The use of well-established methods (e.g., the method of moments) and relatively more recent modeling approaches (e.g., Monte Carlo stochastic modeling) to describe polymerization processes of long-standing interest in industry (e.g., rubber emulsion polymerization) to polymerization systems of more modern interest (e.g., RDRP and plastic pyrolysis processes) are comprehensively covered in the papers contained in this reprint

A client-centric approach to transactional datastores

Modern applications must collect and store massive amounts of data. Cloud storage offers these applications simplicity: the abstraction of a failure-free, perfectly scalable black-box. While appealing, offloading data to the cloud is not without its challenges. These cloud storage systems often favour weaker levels of isolation and consistency. These weaker guarantees introduce behaviours that, without care, can break application logic. Offloading data to an untrusted third party like the cloud also raises questions of security and privacy. This thesis seeks to improve the performance, the semantics and the security of transactional cloud storage systems. It centers around a simple idea: defining consistency guarantees from the perspective of the applications that observe these guarantees, rather than from the perspective of the systems that implement them. This new perspective brings forth several benefits. First, it offers simpler and cleaner definitions of weak isolation and consistency guarantees. Second, it enables scalable implementations of existing guarantees like causal consistency. Finally, it has applications to security: it allows us to efficienctly augment transactional cloud storage systems with obliviousness guaranteesComputer Science

Proceedings of the Seventh Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education

International audienceThis volume contains the Proceedings of the Seventh Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education (ERME), which took place 9-13 February 2011, at Rzeszñw in Poland

Women in Science 2014

Women in Science 2014 summarizes research done by Smith College’s Summer Research Fellowship (SURF) Program participants. Ever since its 1967 start, SURF has been a cornerstone of Smith’s science education. In 2014, 150 students participated in SURF (141 hosted on campus and nearby eld sites), supervised by 61 faculty mentor-advisors drawn from the Clark Science Center and connected to its eighteen science, mathematics, and engineering departments and programs and associated centers and units. At summer’s end, SURF participants were asked to summarize their research experiences for this publication.https://scholarworks.smith.edu/clark_womeninscience/1003/thumbnail.jp