Organization of the Euclid Data Processing: Dealing with Complexity

The data processing development and operations for the Euclid mission (part of the ESA Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 Plan) is distributed within a Consortium composed of 14 countries and 1300+ persons: this imposes a high degree of complexity to the design and implementation of the data processing facilities. The focus of this paper is on the efforts to define an organisational structure capable of handling in manageable terms such a complexity

How can we think the complex?

In this chapter we want to provide philosophical tools for understanding and reasoning about complex systems. Classical thinking, which is taught at most schools and universities, has several problems for coping with complexity. We review classical thinking and its drawbacks when dealing with complexity, for then presenting ways of thinking which allow the better understanding of complex systems. Examples illustrate the ideas presented. This chapter does not deal with specific tools and techniques for managing complex systems, but we try to bring forth ideas that facilitate the thinking and speaking about complex systems

Ackermannian and Primitive-Recursive Bounds with Dickson's Lemma

Dickson's Lemma is a simple yet powerful tool widely used in termination proofs, especially when dealing with counters or related data structures. However, most computer scientists do not know how to derive complexity upper bounds from such termination proofs, and the existing literature is not very helpful in these matters. We propose a new analysis of the length of bad sequences over (N^k,\leq) and explain how one may derive complexity upper bounds from termination proofs. Our upper bounds improve earlier results and are essentially tight

Promising practices for dealing with complexity in research for development

The need to deal with complexity is getting increasingly attention in research for development projects implemented through transboundary research partnerships between organisations from the Global North and the Global South. However, less is known about aspects beyond the systems under study that still affect complexity in the research project. We conducted an experience capitalization of five transboundary research partnerships undertaking research in 14 countries in the Global South. We found that the combination of multiple contexts, the cultural and disciplinary diversity of the transboundary research partnerships, and the set of rules and proceedings from the funding mechanism affect the levels of complexity. We further identified that a transdisciplinary approach and several related practices, like intercultural communication or integrative partnerships, are promising ways of dealing with complexity. Current structures in research for development need to improve in order to fully use the potential of transdisciplinarity for sustainability transformatio

Complexity-entropy causality plane: a useful approach for distinguishing songs

Nowadays we are often faced with huge databases resulting from the rapid growth of data storage technologies. This is particularly true when dealing with music databases. In this context, it is essential to have techniques and tools able to discriminate properties from these massive sets. In this work, we report on a statistical analysis of more than ten thousand songs aiming to obtain a complexity hierarchy. Our approach is based on the estimation of the permutation entropy combined with an intensive complexity measure, building up the complexity-entropy causality plane. The results obtained indicate that this representation space is very promising to discriminate songs as well as to allow a relative quantitative comparison among songs. Additionally, we believe that the here-reported method may be applied in practical situations since it is simple, robust and has a fast numerical implementation.Comment: Accepted for publication in Physica