Systems, Resilience, and Organization: Analogies and Points of Contact with Hierarchy Theory

Aim of this paper is to provide preliminary elements for discussion about the implications of the Hierarchy Theory of Evolution on the design and evolution of artificial systems and socio-technical organizations. In order to achieve this goal, a number of analogies are drawn between the System of Leibniz; the socio-technical architecture known as Fractal Social Organization; resilience and related disciplines; and Hierarchy Theory. In so doing we hope to provide elements for reflection and, hopefully, enrich the discussion on the above topics with considerations pertaining to related fields and disciplines, including computer science, management science, cybernetics, social systems, and general systems theory.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of ANTIFRAGILE'17, 4th International Workshop on Computational Antifragility and Antifragile Engineerin

On environments as systemic exoskeletons: Crosscutting optimizers and antifragility enablers

Classic approaches to General Systems Theory often adopt an individual perspective and a limited number of systemic classes. As a result, those classes include a wide number and variety of systems that result equivalent to each other. This paper introduces a different approach: First, systems belonging to a same class are further differentiated according to five major general characteristics. This introduces a "horizontal dimension" to system classification. A second component of our approach considers systems as nested compositional hierarchies of other sub-systems. The resulting "vertical dimension" further specializes the systemic classes and makes it easier to assess similarities and differences regarding properties such as resilience, performance, and quality-of-experience. Our approach is exemplified by considering a telemonitoring system designed in the framework of Flemish project "Little Sister". We show how our approach makes it possible to design intelligent environments able to closely follow a system's horizontal and vertical organization and to artificially augment its features by serving as crosscutting optimizers and as enablers of antifragile behaviors.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Journal of Reliable Intelligent Environments. Extends conference papers [10,12,15]. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40860-015-0006-

Antifragility = Elasticity + Resilience + Machine Learning: Models and Algorithms for Open System Fidelity

We introduce a model of the fidelity of open systems - fidelity being interpreted here as the compliance between corresponding figures of interest in two separate but communicating domains. A special case of fidelity is given by real-timeliness and synchrony, in which the figure of interest is the physical and the system's notion of time. Our model covers two orthogonal aspects of fidelity, the first one focusing on a system's steady state and the second one capturing that system's dynamic and behavioural characteristics. We discuss how the two aspects correspond respectively to elasticity and resilience and we highlight each aspect's qualities and limitations. Finally we sketch the elements of a new model coupling both of the first model's aspects and complementing them with machine learning. Finally, a conjecture is put forward that the new model may represent a first step towards compositional criteria for antifragile systems.Comment: Preliminary version submitted to the 1st International Workshop "From Dependable to Resilient, from Resilient to Antifragile Ambients and Systems" (ANTIFRAGILE 2014), https://sites.google.com/site/resilience2antifragile

On Resilient Behaviors in Computational Systems and Environments

The present article introduces a reference framework for discussing resilience of computational systems. Rather than a property that may or may not be exhibited by a system, resilience is interpreted here as the emerging result of a dynamic process. Said process represents the dynamic interplay between the behaviors exercised by a system and those of the environment it is set to operate in. As a result of this interpretation, coherent definitions of several aspects of resilience can be derived and proposed, including elasticity, change tolerance, and antifragility. Definitions are also provided for measures of the risk of unresilience as well as for the optimal match of a given resilient design with respect to the current environmental conditions. Finally, a resilience strategy based on our model is exemplified through a simple scenario.Comment: The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40860-015-0002-6 The paper considerably extends the results of two conference papers that are available at http://ow.ly/KWfkj and http://ow.ly/KWfgO. Text and formalism in those papers has been used or adapted in the herewith submitted pape

Intervention strategies for children and adolescent with disorders: from intrapsychic to transactional perspective

A large amount of studies and clinical evidence document the importance of infancy and early childhood influences on long term developmental trajectories toward mental health or psychopathology (Sameroff, 2000, 2010). Without healthy, productive adults no culture could continue to be successful. This concern is the main motivation for society to support child development research. Although the academic interests of contemporary developmental researchers range widely in cognitive and socialemotional domains, the political justification for supporting such studies is that they will lead to the understanding and ultimate prevention of behavioural problems that are costly to society. With these motivations and support, there have been major advances in our understanding of the intellectual, emotional, and social behaviour of children, adolescents and adults. This progress has forced conceptual reorientations from a unidirectionalunderstanding of development (e.g., parents affect children and not vice versa) toward a bidirectional conceptualization of development. Childrenare now assumed to affect and even select their environments as much as their environments affect their behaviour. Indeed, key among many of the most influential developmental theories in the past several decades is the assumption that children have bidirectional, or reciprocal, relationships with their environments (Bandura, 1977; Bronfenbrenner, 1979). To date, it is widely accepted that children’s healthy development is shaped by complex transactional processes among a variety of risk and protective factors, with cumulative risk factors increasing the prediction of emotional and behavioural problems (Anda et al., 2007; Rutter & Sroufe, 2000; Sameroff, 2000). Risk and protective factors include individual child characteristics such as genetic and constitutional propensities and cognitive strengths and vulnerabilities; parent characteristics such as mental health, education level, sense of efficacy, and resourcefulness; family factors such as quality of the parent-child relationship, emotional climate, and marital quality; community connectedness factors such as parental social support, social resources, and children’s peer relationships; and neighbourhood factors such as availability of resources, adequacy of housing, and levels of crime and violence (Sameroff & Fiese, 2000). The predictive value of these factors across many studies led to the development of transactional-bioecological models that attempt to conceptualize the relative contributions of proximal and distal risk and protective factors to children’s developmental outcome (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006). In 1975, Sameroff and Chandler proposed the transactional model. This theoretical framework has become central to understanding the interplay between nature and nurture in explaining the development of positive and negative outcomes for children. The transactional model is a model of qualitative change. Sameroff asserted that the transactional model concerned qualitative rather than incremental change and that the underlying process was dialectical rather mechanistic in nature. The aim of this chapter is to explore this theoretical framework and its intervention strategies. In the first part, the transactional model will be described after a brief summary that will illustrate the transition from intrapsychic to transactional perspective. In the second part, intervention strategies for children and adolescent will be described. The attention of research on environmental risk and protective factors has fostered a more comprehensive understanding of what is necessary to improve the cognitive and social-emotional welfare of children and adolescents

Health school-based mindfulness interventions for improving mental health: a systematic review and thematic synthesis of qualitative studies

School-based mindfulness interventions have recently shown promise for treating and preventing mental health issues in young people. However, the literature lacks a high-level perspective of the impact of mindfulness on young people’s mental health according to their own first-hand accounts. Therefore, the objective of this study was to conduct the first systematic review and thematic synthesis to rigorously evaluate the qualitative evidence pertaining to students’ experiences of school-based MBIs. The following electronic databases were searched for qualitative school-based mindfulness intervention papers published up until the end of March 2019: PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, ProQuest, and Google Scholar. An assessment of study quality was undertaken using the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme qualitative checklist. The initial literature search returned 4102 papers and seven studies met all of the inclusion criteria. The thematic synthesis identified four major themes of (i) using attentional processes to regulate emotions and cognitions, (ii) stress reduction, (iii) improved coping and social skills, and (iv) calming and/or relaxation. Findings show that school-based MBIs are experienced by students as having a range of benefits to mental health, including in both preventative and treatment contexts. However, efforts should be made to improve methodological quality, including taking steps to minimise recall bias and provide a greater degree of transparency regarding how students are selected to attend qualitative interviews or focus groups.N

Fast Damage Recovery in Robotics with the T-Resilience Algorithm

Damage recovery is critical for autonomous robots that need to operate for a long time without assistance. Most current methods are complex and costly because they require anticipating each potential damage in order to have a contingency plan ready. As an alternative, we introduce the T-resilience algorithm, a new algorithm that allows robots to quickly and autonomously discover compensatory behaviors in unanticipated situations. This algorithm equips the robot with a self-model and discovers new behaviors by learning to avoid those that perform differently in the self-model and in reality. Our algorithm thus does not identify the damaged parts but it implicitly searches for efficient behaviors that do not use them. We evaluate the T-Resilience algorithm on a hexapod robot that needs to adapt to leg removal, broken legs and motor failures; we compare it to stochastic local search, policy gradient and the self-modeling algorithm proposed by Bongard et al. The behavior of the robot is assessed on-board thanks to a RGB-D sensor and a SLAM algorithm. Using only 25 tests on the robot and an overall running time of 20 minutes, T-Resilience consistently leads to substantially better results than the other approaches

Global Risks 2014, Ninth Edition.

The Global Risks 2014 report highlights how global risks are not only interconnected but also have systemic impacts. To manage global risks effectively and build resilience to their impacts, better efforts are needed to understand, measure and foresee the evolution of interdependencies between risks, supplementing traditional risk-management tools with new concepts designed for uncertain environments. If global risks are not effectively addressed, their social, economic and political fallouts could be far-reaching, as exemplified by the continuing impacts of the financial crisis of 2007-2008