French Roadmap for complex Systems 2008-2009

This second issue of the French Complex Systems Roadmap is the outcome of the Entretiens de Cargese 2008, an interdisciplinary brainstorming session organized over one week in 2008, jointly by RNSC, ISC-PIF and IXXI. It capitalizes on the first roadmap and gathers contributions of more than 70 scientists from major French institutions. The aim of this roadmap is to foster the coordination of the complex systems community on focused topics and questions, as well as to present contributions and challenges in the complex systems sciences and complexity science to the public, political and industrial spheres

Exploring a Biomimicry Approach to Enhance Ecological Sustainability in Architecture

Increased environmental consciousness in recent years, stimulated by concerns about human induced climate change, has motivated a desire to reduce the impact of the built environment through eco efficient design imperatives. This evolution has provided eco practitioners with multifaceted challenges in making their practices more ecologically sustainable through optimal approaches to design. One such design approach to ecological sustainability is to emulate or take creative inspiration from natural systems, often referred to as biomimicry. This study examines how eco practitioners perceive biomimicry as a design approach in architectural eco design practice. An exploratory approach, taking a post-positivist epistemological framework informed a mixed method, correlational, project-based research design. The theoretical contribution was a model and framework for biomimicry thinking which suggested ways of addressing problems of conceptualisation and understanding the complexities of ecological integration that had been identified as barriers to the practice of ecologically sustainable design. The empirical contribution was a recommendation for a Biomimicry Approach, which proposed a simultaneous use of indirectly mimicking and directly mimicking to architectural eco design projects. Multivariate statistical analysis recognised biomimicry principles, design propositions and physical attributes as the most significant predictors that can enhance ecological sustainability in architecture. The study’s outcome in relation to biomimicry advanced understanding of ways to reduce waste by efficient spatial design was seen as a contribution architects can make to the concept of a reduction scenario for the ecological age. This thesis adds important knowledge to underpin future research and recommends biomimicry design indicators, biomimicry design matrix and possibilities for the use of vernacular architectural strategies for the development of architectural eco design practice

Exploring a Biomimicry Approach to Enhance Ecological Sustainability in Architecture

Increased environmental consciousness in recent years, stimulated by concerns about human induced climate change, has motivated a desire to reduce the impact of the built environment through eco efficient design imperatives. This evolution has provided eco practitioners with multifaceted challenges in making their practices more ecologically sustainable through optimal approaches to design. One such design approach to ecological sustainability is to emulate or take creative inspiration from natural systems, often referred to as biomimicry. This study examines how eco practitioners perceive biomimicry as a design approach in architectural eco design practice. An exploratory approach, taking a post-positivist epistemological framework informed a mixed method, correlational, project-based research design. The theoretical contribution was a model and framework for biomimicry thinking which suggested ways of addressing problems of conceptualisation and understanding the complexities of ecological integration that had been identified as barriers to the practice of ecologically sustainable design. The empirical contribution was a recommendation for a Biomimicry Approach, which proposed a simultaneous use of indirectly mimicking and directly mimicking to architectural eco design projects. Multivariate statistical analysis recognised biomimicry principles, design propositions and physical attributes as the most significant predictors that can enhance ecological sustainability in architecture. The study’s outcome in relation to biomimicry advanced understanding of ways to reduce waste by efficient spatial design was seen as a contribution architects can make to the concept of a reduction scenario for the ecological age. This thesis adds important knowledge to underpin future research and recommends biomimicry design indicators, biomimicry design matrix and possibilities for the use of vernacular architectural strategies for the development of architectural eco design practice

KINE[SIS]TEM'17 From Nature to Architectural Matter

Kine[SiS]tem – From Kinesis + System. Kinesis is a non-linear movement or activity of an organism in response to a stimulus. A system is a set of interacting and interdependent agents forming a complex whole, delineated by its spatial and temporal boundaries, influenced by its environment. How can architectural systems moderate the external environment to enhance comfort conditions in a simple, sustainable and smart way? This is the starting question for the Kine[SiS]tem’17 – From Nature to Architectural Matter International Conference. For decades, architectural design was developed despite (and not with) the climate, based on mechanical heating and cooling. Today, the argument for net zero energy buildings needs very effective strategies to reduce energy requirements. The challenge ahead requires design processes that are built upon consolidated knowledge, make use of advanced technologies and are inspired by nature. These design processes should lead to responsive smart systems that deliver the best performance in each specific design scenario. To control solar radiation is one key factor in low-energy thermal comfort. Computational-controlled sensor-based kinetic surfaces are one of the possible answers to control solar energy in an effective way, within the scope of contradictory objectives throughout the year.FC

Adaptive and learning-based formation control of swarm robots

Autonomous aerial and wheeled mobile robots play a major role in tasks such as search and rescue, transportation, monitoring, and inspection. However, these operations are faced with a few open challenges including robust autonomy, and adaptive coordination based on the environment and operating conditions, particularly in swarm robots with limited communication and perception capabilities. Furthermore, the computational complexity increases exponentially with the number of robots in the swarm. This thesis examines two different aspects of the formation control problem. On the one hand, we investigate how formation could be performed by swarm robots with limited communication and perception (e.g., Crazyflie nano quadrotor). On the other hand, we explore human-swarm interaction (HSI) and different shared-control mechanisms between human and swarm robots (e.g., BristleBot) for artistic creation. In particular, we combine bio-inspired (i.e., flocking, foraging) techniques with learning-based control strategies (using artificial neural networks) for adaptive control of multi- robots. We first review how learning-based control and networked dynamical systems can be used to assign distributed and decentralized policies to individual robots such that the desired formation emerges from their collective behavior. We proceed by presenting a novel flocking control for UAV swarm using deep reinforcement learning. We formulate the flocking formation problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), and consider a leader-follower configuration, where consensus among all UAVs is used to train a shared control policy, and each UAV performs actions based on the local information it collects. In addition, to avoid collision among UAVs and guarantee flocking and navigation, a reward function is added with the global flocking maintenance, mutual reward, and a collision penalty. We adapt deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) with centralized training and decentralized execution to obtain the flocking control policy using actor-critic networks and a global state space matrix. In the context of swarm robotics in arts, we investigate how the formation paradigm can serve as an interaction modality for artists to aesthetically utilize swarms. In particular, we explore particle swarm optimization (PSO) and random walk to control the communication between a team of robots with swarming behavior for musical creation

Rewriting the Matrix of Life. Biomedia Between Ecological Crisis and Playful Actions

The paper discusses concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘life’ as subjected to historical changes. The 21st century seems to be obsessed with ‘life’ and ‘nature’, which are reconfigured as objects of simulation practices and of a multitude of technoscientific enterprises as well as of political struggle. The historical influences and epistemological shifts of systems thinking are significant within two distinctive and interwoven fields: On the one hand the discourse of environmentalism with the paradigm of ecological crises, centered around ideas of resource management, sustainability, the general idea of an ‘endangered nature’ and the interconnectedness of global politics and individual actions. On the other hand the optimistic promises of artificial life, with synthetic biology and digital cyborg technologies as its avantgarde, which are very much driven by the idea of technoscientific mastery to surpass natures ‘weakness’ and by desires to improve ‘life’ and to even refashion ‘life itself’. On the field of historical ecology, concepts of systems thinking are traced back to the middle of the 19th century, where ecological thought emerged at the intersections of biology and geography. Meandering between vitalistic, holistic, and mechanistic concepts, between living and non-living elements, systems ecology finally substitutes ‘nature’, which in turn is re-established in its new ‘gestalt’ as computer simulated world model since the early 1970s. Resurrected as an interrelation of system variables at the level of global simulations ‘nature’ strikes as a zombie. As a second turning point of the rewriting of the matrix, of life we will discuss the advance of ‘games’ since the early 1970ies, with the example of ‘Game of life’ (‘Life’) as a significant landmark. When ‘life’ becomes ‘Life’, it is by computerized modeling in terms of dynamic processes. Computer games can be thought of as instances of the popularization of cybernetic system thinking, functioning as interdiscoursive fragments between the specialized discourse of system theories and the sphere of ‘common sense’ (Nohr 2008), where the specific “gaming situation” (Eskelinen 2001) foregrounds playful individual action and manipulation of system objects within a set of given rules or the manipulation of system rules itself on the level of the ‘code’. We will argue that both, the ecological discourse and the algorithmic model of self-reproduction of ‘Life’, are historically and systematically related manifestations and mediations of system theory. While they can be regarded as referring to different scales of application (macro-economic reasoning in the case of global eco-systems, modeling of bottom-up-complexity on a micro-level in the case of ‘Life’) and belonging to distinctive disciplines (economic and ecological research vs. mathematical theory of automata and artificial life studies), they share some common ground in being “algorithmic media” (Marks 2014) that are functional as “rhetorical software” (Doyle 1997) and as “allegorithms” (Galloway 2006) of the new compositions of the techno-biological and techno-ecological situation of the 21st century