To boldly go:an occam-π mission to engineer emergence

Future systems will be too complex to design and implement explicitly. Instead, we will have to learn to engineer complex behaviours indirectly: through the discovery and application of local rules of behaviour, applied to simple process components, from which desired behaviours predictably emerge through dynamic interactions between massive numbers of instances. This paper describes a process-oriented architecture for fine-grained concurrent systems that enables experiments with such indirect engineering. Examples are presented showing the differing complex behaviours that can arise from minor (non-linear) adjustments to low-level parameters, the difficulties in suppressing the emergence of unwanted (bad) behaviour, the unexpected relationships between apparently unrelated physical phenomena (shown up by their separate emergence from the same primordial process swamp) and the ability to explore and engineer completely new physics (such as force fields) by their emergence from low-level process interactions whose mechanisms can only be imagined, but not built, at the current time

From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design

As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain "ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources, environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c

Overcoming Local Minima Through Viscoelastic Fluid-Inspired Swarm Behavior

My paper discusses a novel swarm robotic algorithm inspired by the open channel siphon phenomena displayed in certain viscoelastic fluids. This siphoning ability enables the algorithm to mitigate the trapping effects of local minima, which are known to affect physicomimetics-based potential field control methods. Once a robot senses the goal, local communication between robots is used to propagate path-to-goal gradient information through the swarm's communication graph. This information is used to augment each agent's local potential field, reducing the local minima trap and often eliminating it. In this paper real world experiments using the Georgia Tech Miniature Autonomous Blimp (GT-MAB) aerial robotic platforms as well as mass Monte Carlo test simulations conducted in the Simulating Collaborative Robots in Massive Multi-Agent Game Execution (SCRIMMAGE) simulator are presented. Comparisons between the resultant behaviors and potential field based swarm behaviors that both do, and do not incorporate local minima fixes were assessed. These experiments and simulations demonstrate that this method is an effective solution to susceptibility to local minima for potential field approaches for controlling swarms

Artificial Collective Intelligence Engineering: a Survey of Concepts and Perspectives

Collectiveness is an important property of many systems--both natural and artificial. By exploiting a large number of individuals, it is often possible to produce effects that go far beyond the capabilities of the smartest individuals, or even to produce intelligent collective behaviour out of not-so-intelligent individuals. Indeed, collective intelligence, namely the capability of a group to act collectively in a seemingly intelligent way, is increasingly often a design goal of engineered computational systems--motivated by recent techno-scientific trends like the Internet of Things, swarm robotics, and crowd computing, just to name a few. For several years, the collective intelligence observed in natural and artificial systems has served as a source of inspiration for engineering ideas, models, and mechanisms. Today, artificial and computational collective intelligence are recognised research topics, spanning various techniques, kinds of target systems, and application domains. However, there is still a lot of fragmentation in the research panorama of the topic within computer science, and the verticality of most communities and contributions makes it difficult to extract the core underlying ideas and frames of reference. The challenge is to identify, place in a common structure, and ultimately connect the different areas and methods addressing intelligent collectives. To address this gap, this paper considers a set of broad scoping questions providing a map of collective intelligence research, mostly by the point of view of computer scientists and engineers. Accordingly, it covers preliminary notions, fundamental concepts, and the main research perspectives, identifying opportunities and challenges for researchers on artificial and computational collective intelligence engineering.Comment: This is the author's final version of the article, accepted for publication in the Artificial Life journal. Data: 34 pages, 2 figure

An Approach Based on Particle Swarm Optimization for Inspection of Spacecraft Hulls by a Swarm of Miniaturized Robots

The remoteness and hazards that are inherent to the operating environments of space infrastructures promote their need for automated robotic inspection. In particular, micrometeoroid and orbital debris impact and structural fatigue are common sources of damage to spacecraft hulls. Vibration sensing has been used to detect structural damage in spacecraft hulls as well as in structural health monitoring practices in industry by deploying static sensors. In this paper, we propose using a swarm of miniaturized vibration-sensing mobile robots realizing a network of mobile sensors. We present a distributed inspection algorithm based on the bio-inspired particle swarm optimization and evolutionary algorithm niching techniques to deliver the task of enumeration and localization of an a priori unknown number of vibration sources on a simplified 2.5D spacecraft surface. Our algorithm is deployed on a swarm of simulated cm-scale wheeled robots. These are guided in their inspection task by sensing vibrations arising from failure points on the surface which are detected by on-board accelerometers. We study three performance metrics: (1) proximity of the localized sources to the ground truth locations, (2) time to localize each source, and (3) time to finish the inspection task given a 75% inspection coverage threshold. We find that our swarm is able to successfully localize the present so

Body Conjunction = Wavering Between Actual and Virtual Spaces

In the present digital age, the body tends to extend beyond it being flesh, it can be extended, it is a body without organs, and it might belong to more than your own-self. The “Body” as a living entity with its embedded sensory system, not only embodies who we are but also lets us understand and explore the sensitive, unpredictable but fascinating world. The body is an information receiver as well as information reactor. Through years of medical experiments and research on the body, medical devices and instruments are able to allow us to look into the deepest and the most mysterious spots in the human body. For instance, if seen through an HD monitor, while being probed by an endoscope, the body appears as an immersive and infinite landscape. By observing the smoothness and the folds of the surfaces encountered within the body, it is quite simple to project your individual self into this body-scape for a while to imagine and experience this immersive organic space. Various potential ideas of designing a body-like space have become the subject of design fantasies of a number of architects. The “Vitruvian Man”, which, Vitruvius described in the third book of De Architectura, and was later interpreted and illustrated by Leonardo DaVinci, has served as the human figure/body representation to be used as a measuring unit rather than being considered as a sensitive object. Unsurprisingly, it was a relatively long journey for architects to abandon this dogma. After the industrial revolution (during the modernist era), the concrete evidence of considering body proportions as potential measurements could still be seen in the projects of Le Corbusier, which accompanied his famous school of thought: “A house is a machine for living”. He developed the “Modular” in a mathematical proportion of space based on figures and intended to replace the old Vitruvian man with it as a new generation’s typical model. However, with the rapid development of electronic technology, the trend of realizing sensory environments akin to living bodies has no longer remained a thought but can be seen as an initial action to refuse to see the human body merely as a measuring unit. The turning point came about the time while the medium of news media, television, and social media became relatively mature, and thus started making people conduct critical reflections. Marshall McLuhan, a well-known pioneering media theorist, stated in his well-known publication, “Understanding Media: The Extension of Man” (McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964). This explicit shot made the researcher foresee the potential and intimate relationships between the body, technology, and space, and somehow have a rational explanation to extend the physical body to endless space, which is crucial in this chapter