UM-SFI Workshop, Fall 2003

Emergence and Engineering in Complex Systems
Wed-Fri, 12-14 November 2003
9:00am - 12:00; 2:00pm-5.00pm

Visitor Information

Each fall term The University of Michigan Center for the Study of Complex Systems (CSCS) hosts the "UM-SFI Workshop" to gather together a relatively small group of researchers for a few days of talks and discussion of some Complex Adaptive Systems topics.

This year's speakers will be addressing this theme in a variety of settings, with "systems" understood as broad category including software systems, cognitive systems, hardware (robotic) systems or physical structures (e.g., architectural designs). One common thread uniting these diverse systems is the real challenge of creating these kinds of complex systems with particular structural or dynamic properties, e.g., to create:

• architectural or computer chip designs that achieve desired goals subject to various constraints;
• flexible, relatively open computer networks that are also secure;
• stable and resilient yet efficient power grids;
• physical robots to do specified jobs; and
• electronic markets with particular properties and dynamics.

Part of the challenge in creating complex systems like those listed is that while some properties can be more-or-less directly designed into a system, other properties emerge from the interaction of the system's parts. In addition, there is a growing interest in approaches to design that don't just take the emergent properties as complexities to be kept under control, but instead try to harness those emergent properties to achieve design goals.

Workshop Schedule

Note: This is a tentative schedule, which may change if some speakers have constraints on when they can talk.

Wednesday 12 November

	8:30am	Coffee & Continental Breakfast Introductions: Carl Simon, Director CSCS Opening Remarks: James Bean, Assoc. Dean for Academic Affairs, School of Engineering, University of Michigan
	9:00	Trading Agents Competing - Abstract Michael Wellman, Director, Artificial Intelligence Lab Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan <http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/wellman/>
	10:30	Break
	11:00	Engineering for Emergence: Robots and Creative Surfaces - Abstract Una-May O'Reilly, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, MIT <unamay@ai.mit.edu> <http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/unamay/>
	12:30pm	Break for Lunch
	2:00	Coevolutionary Learning - Abstract Melanie Mitchell, Computer Science & Engineering, Oregon Graduate Institute External Faculty, Santa Fe Institute <mm@cse.ogi.edu> <http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~mm/>
	3:30	Use of heuristics methods for system-wide coordination in noisy environments Luis Amaral, Chemical Engineering, Northwestern University <amaral@northwestern.edu> <http://www.chem-eng.northwestern.edu/Faculty/amaral.html>

Thursday 13 November

	8:30am	Coffee & Continental Breakfast Opening Remarks
	9:00	Self-organization in phase transitions and geometric graphs - Abstract Raissa D'Souza, Microsoft <raissa@microsoft.com> <http://research.microsoft.com/users/raissa/>
	10:30	Break
	11:00	Emergence of Creativity - Abstract John Koza, Consulting Professor, Medical Informatics, Electrical Engineering, Stanford University <koza@cs.stanford.edu> <http://www.genetic-programming.com/johnkoza.html>
	12:30pm	Break for Lunch
	2:00	Toward a Synthesis of Form and Function: Notes from the Pre-Genomic Era of Robotics - Abstract Daniel Koditschek, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Lab, University of Michigan <kod@umich.edu> <http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/kod/>
	3:30	Move to 1504 GG Brown Building (Iacocca Room) for Open seminar sponsored by STIET and CSCS
	4:00	Finding Needles in a 30TB Haystack, 200 Million Times a Day Peter Norvig, Director of Search Quality, Google <peter@norvig.com> <http://www.norvig.com/>

Friday 14 November

	8:30am	Coffee & Continental Breakfast Opening Remarks
	9:00	Building Complex Human-level Synthetic Characters - Abstract John Laird, Assoc. Chair, Computer Science & Engineering Artificial Intelligence, University of Michigan <laird@umich.edu> <http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/laird/>
	10:30	Break
	11:00	Adaptive Defense of Computing Infastructures Stephanie Forrest, Computer Science, University of New Mexico External Faculty, Santa Fe Institute <forrest@cs.unm.edu> <http://www.cs.unm.edu/~forrest/>
	12:30pm	Break for Lunch
	2:00	Predictive Models for Reinforcement Learning - Abstract Satinder Singh, Computer Science & Engineering, University of Michigan <baveja@umich.edu> <http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~baveja/>
	3:30	Strategies for Discovering Coordination Needs Ed Durfee, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science School of Information, University of Michigan <durfee@umich.edu> <http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/durfee/durfee.html>