Robustness and autonomy in biological systems: how regulatory mechanisms enable functional integration, complexity and minimal cognition through the action of second-order control constraints

Living systems employ several mechanisms and behaviors to achieve robustness and maintain themselves under changing internal and external conditions. Regulation stands out from them as a specific form of higher-order control, exerted over the basic regime responsible for the production and maintenance of the organism, and provides the system with the capacity to act on its own constitutive dynamics. It consists in the capability to selectively shift between different available regimes of self-production and self-maintenance in response to specific signals and perturbations, due to the action of a dedicated subsystem which is operationally distinct from the regulated ones. The role of regulation, however, is not exhausted by its contribution to maintain a living system’s viability. While enhancing robustness, regulatory mechanisms play a fundamental role in the realization of an autonomous biological organization. Specifically, they are at the basis of the remarkable integration of biological systems, insofar as they coordinate and modulate the activity of distinct functional subsystems. Moreover, by implementing complex and hierarchically organized control architectures, they allow for an increase in structural and organizational complexity while minimizing fragility. Finally, they endow living systems, from their most basic unicellular instances, with the capability to control their own internal dynamics to adaptively respond to specific features of their interaction with the environment, thus providing the basis for the emergence of minimal forms of cognition

Incremental Tree-Based Missing Data Imputation with Lexicographic Ordering

Missing data, Classification and regression tree, FAST splitting algorithm, Lexicographic order, Nonparametric imputation, Data editing,

Robustness and Autonomy in Biological Systems: How Regulatory Mechanisms Enable Functional Integration, Complexity and Minimal Cognition Through the Action of Second-Order Control Constraints

International audienceLiving systems employ several mechanisms and behaviors to achieve robustness and maintain themselves under changing internal and external conditions. Regulation stands out from them as a specific form of higher-order control, exerted over the basic regime responsible for the production and maintenance of the organism, and provides the system with the capacity to act on its own constitutive dynamics. It consists in the capability to selectively shift between different available regimes of self-production and self-maintenance in response to specific signals and perturbations, due to the action of a dedicated subsystem which is operationally distinct from the regulated ones. The role of regulation, however, is not exhausted by its contribution to maintain a living system's viability. While enhancing robustness, regulatory mechanisms play a fundamental role in the realization of an autonomous biological organization. Specifically, they are at the basis of the remarkable integration of biological systems, insofar as they coordinate and modulate the activity of distinct functional subsystems. Moreover, by implementing complex and hierarchically organized control architectures, they allow for an increase in structural and organizational complexity while minimizing fragility. Finally, they endow living systems, from their most basic unicellular instances, with the capability to control their own internal dynamics to adaptively respond to specific features of their interaction with the environment, thus providing the basis for the emergence of minimal forms of cognition

The ATLAS level-1 trigger: Status of the system and first results from cosmic-ray data

The ATLAS detector at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be exposed to proton proton collisions from beams crossing at 40 MHz. At the design luminosity of 1034 cm(-2) s(-1) there are on average 23 collisions per bunch crossing. A three-level trigger system will select potentially interesting events in order to reduce the readout rate to about 200 Hz. The first trigger level is implemented in custom-built electronics and makes an initial fast selection based on detector data of coarse granularity. It has to reduce the rate by a factor of 104 to less than 100 kHz. The other two consecutive trigger levels are in software and run on PC farms. We present an overview of the first-level trigger system and report on the current installation status. Moreover, we show analysis results of cosmic-ray data recorded in situ at the ATLAS experimental site with final or close-to-final hardware. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. RI Perrino, Roberto/B-4633-2010; Kurashige, Hisaya/H-4916-2012; Veneziano, Stefano/J-1610-2012; spagnolo, stefania/A-6359-201