An information-theoretic approach to self-organisation: Emergence of complex interdependencies in coupled dynamical systems

Self-organisation lies at the core of fundamental but still unresolved scientific questions, and holds the promise of de-centralised paradigms crucial for future technological developments. While self-organising processes have been traditionally explained by the tendency of dynamical systems to evolve towards specific configurations, or attractors, we see self-organisation as a consequence of the interdependencies that those attractors induce. Building on this intuition, in this work we develop a theoretical framework for understanding and quantifying self-organisation based on coupled dynamical systems and multivariate information theory. We propose a metric of global structural strength that identifies when self-organisation appears, and a multi-layered decomposition that explains the emergent structure in terms of redundant and synergistic interdependencies. We illustrate our framework on elementary cellular automata, showing how it can detect and characterise the emergence of complex structures

A generalisation of the maximum entropy principle for curved statistical manifolds

The maximum entropy principle (MEP) is one of the most prominent methods to investigate and model complex systems. Despite its popularity, the standard form of the MEP can only generate Boltzmann-Gibbs distributions, which are ill-suited for many scenarios of interest. As a principled approach to extend the reach of the MEP, this paper revisits its foundations in information geometry and shows how the geometry of curved statistical manifolds naturally leads to a generalisation of the MEP based on the Rényi entropy. By establishing a bridge between non-Euclidean geometry and the MEP, our proposal sets a solid foundation for the numerous applications of the Rényi entropy, and enables a range of novel methods for complex systems analysis

Reshaping cellular networks for the sky: Major factors and feasibility

This paper studies the feasibility of supporting drone operations using existent cellular infrastructure. We propose an analytical framework that includes the effects of base station (BS) height and antenna radiation pattern, drone antenna directivity and various propagation environments. With this framework, we derive an exact expression for the coverage probability of ground and drone users through a practical cell association strategy. Our results show that a carefully designed network can control the radiated interference that is received by the drones, and therefore guarantees a satisfactory quality of service. Moreover, as the network density grows the increasing level of interference can be partially managed by lowering the drone flying altitude. However, even at optimal conditions the drone coverage performance converges to zero considerably fast, suggesting that ultra-dense networks might be poor candidates for serving aerial users.Comment: #Accepted for presentation at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) 2018 #Final Version #Related Works: 1- arXiv:1710.03103, 2- arXiv:1708.0659

Tangled worldview model of opinion dynamics

We study the joint evolution of worldviews by proposing a model of opinion dynamics, which is inspired in notions from evolutionary ecology. Agents update their opinion on a specific issue based on their propensity to change – asserted by the social neighbours – weighted by their mutual similarity on other issues. Agents are, therefore, more influenced by neighbours with similar worldviews (set of opinions on various issues), resulting in a complex co-evolution of each opinion. Simulations show that the worldview evolution exhibits events of intermittent polarization when the social network is scale-free. This, in turn, triggers extreme crashes and surges in the popularity of various opinions. Using the proposed model, we highlight the role of network structure, bounded rationality of agents, and the role of key influential agents in causing polarization and intermittent reformation of worldviews on scale-free networks