Posts

Showing posts from 2015

Postdoctoral Fellowships at UNAM

Image
//Please forward to whom may be interested.

 The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) has an open call for postdoctoral fellowships to start in September, 2016 . 

Candidates should have obtained a PhD degree within the last three years and be under 36 years, both to the date of the beginning of the fellowship.

 The area of interests of candidates should fall within complex systems, artificial life, information, evolution, cognition, robotics, and/or philosophy.

 Interested candidates should send CV and a tentative project/research interests (1 paragraph) to cgg-at-unam.mx by  Monday, February 8th  (if starting in September 2016, otherwise in the coming months, there will be a later call for March, 2017 with a summer deadline).  Postdoctoral fellowships are between one and two years (after renewal).
 Spanish is not a requisite.
 Accepted candidates would be working at the Computer Science Department ( http://turing.iimas.unam.mx  ) of the IIMAS ( http://www

CfP: ALife XV, Cancun 2016

Image
Paper/ abstract submission deadline: February 14th, 2016 Notification to authors: March 25th, 2016 Camera ready due: April 24th, 2016 The Fifteenth International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (ALife XV) will be held in Cancun, Mexico on July 4th-8th, 2016. http://xva.life We cordially invite you to submit your work in either full paper (8 pages) or extended abstract (2 pages) format. Accepted papers and abstracts will be published by MIT Press as  open-access electronic proceedings .  Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following aspects of Artificial Life: – Computational humanities/anthropology/archeology – Evolution of language, computational linguistics – Bio-inspired, cognitive and evolutionary robotics – Self-replication, self-repair and morphogenesis – Artificial chemistry, origins of life – Cellular automata and discrete dynamical systems – Perception, cognition and behavior – Embodied, interactive sys

Bioinformatics Research Professor Position at UNAM

The  Instituto de Investigaciones en Matemáticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas  (IIMAS) of the  Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México  (UNAM) has an open call for a research professor position in bioinformatics . This position, aimed consists of renewable one-year contracts with the possibility of tenure after three years. The aim of these positions is to create a research group in the new campus of UNAM in Mérida, Yucatán , part of the Science and Technology Park of Yucatán . Application deadline: October 12, 2015. More details (in Spanish) at this link .

Paper published: Urban Transfer Entropy across Scales

The morphology of urban agglomeration is studied here in the context of information exchange between different spatio-temporal scales. Urban migration to and from cities is characterised as non-random and following non-random pathways. Cities are multidimensional non-linear phenomena, so understanding the relationships and connectivity between scales is important in determining how the interplay of local/regional urban policies may affect the distribution of urban settlements. In order to quantify these relationships, we follow an information theoretic approach using the concept of Transfer Entropy. Our analysis is based on a stochastic urban fractal model, which mimics urban growing settlements and migration waves. The results indicate how different policies could affect urban morphology in terms of the information generated across geographical scales. Murcio R, Morphet R, Gershenson C, Batty M (2015) Urban Transfer Entropy across Scales. PLoS ONE 10(7): e0133780. doi:10.1371/journ

Paper published: Measuring the complexity of adaptive peer-to-peer systems

To improve the efficiency of peer-to-peer (P2P) systems while adapting to changing environmental conditions, static peer-to-peer protocols can be replaced by adaptive plans. The resulting systems are inherently complex, which makes their development and characterization a challenge for traditional methods. Here we propose the design and analysis of adaptive P2P systems using measures of complexity, emergence, self-organization, and homeostasis based on information theory. These measures allow the evaluation of adaptive P2P systems and thus can be used to guide their design. We evaluate the proposal with a P2P computing system provided with adaptation mechanisms. We show the evolution of the system with static and also changing workload, using different fitness functions. When the adaptive plan forces the system to converge to a predefined performance level, the nodes may result in highly unstable configurations, which correspond to a high variance in time of the measured complexity. Co

New draft: When slower is faster

The slower is faster (SIF) effect occurs when a system performs worse when its components try to be better. Thus, a moderate individual efficiency actually leads to a better systemic performance. The SIF effect takes place in a variety of phenomena. We review studies and examples of the SIF effect in pedestrian dynamics, vehicle traffic, traffic light control, logistics, public transport, social dynamics, ecological systems, and adaptation. Drawing on these examples we generalize common features of the SIF effect and suggest possible future lines of research. When slower is faster Carlos Gershenson, Dirk Helbing http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.06796 Update : paper was published in Complexity : http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cplx.21736/abstract

Five postdoctoral fellowships in complex systems, UNAM

As a part of the consolidation of the National Laboratory of Complexity, the Center for Complexity Science of the National Autonomous University of Mexico is seeking outstanding candidates for five one year postdoctoral positions beginning in August, 2015. Research plans from all areas related to complex systems are encouraged. Please send CV and research plan to cgg [at] unam.mx before June 10th. //Please forward to whom may be interested.



New paper: Rank Diversity of Languages: Generic Behavior in Computational Linguistics

Statistical studies of languages have focused on the rank-frequency distribution of words. Instead, we introduce here a measure of how word ranks change in time and call this distribution rank diversity. We calculate this diversity for books published in six European languages since 1800, and find that it follows a universal lognormal distribution. Based on the mean and standard deviation associated with the lognormal distribution, we define three different word regimes of languages: “heads” consist of words which almost do not change their rank in time, “bodies” are words of general use, while “tails” are comprised by context-specific words and vary their rank considerably in time. The heads and bodies reflect the size of language cores identified by linguists for basic communication. We propose a Gaussian random walk model which reproduces the rank variation of words in time and thus the diversity. Rank diversity of words can be understood as the result of random variations in rank,

Two Research Professor Positions at UNAM: Bioinformatics and Signal Processing

The  Instituto de Investigaciones en Matemáticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas  (IIMAS) of the  Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México  (UNAM) has open calls for research professor positions in bioinformatics and signal processing . This position, aimed consists of renewable one-year contracts with the possibility of tenure after three years. The aim of these positions is to create a research group in the new campus of UNAM in Mérida, Yucatán , part of the Science and Technology Park of Yucatán . Application deadline: April 21st. More details (in Spanish) at the links in bold above.