CS students at the University of Kent are currently choosing their modules for next year — and their choice includes CO538 Concurrency Design and Practice, which teaches concurrent software engineering using the same techniques that we’ve used for much of the CoSMoS work. Our demo reel video shows some of the CoSMoS case studies, followed by some of the assessment solutions that students have submitted over the past couple of years:
If you’d like to see more videos of CoSMoS simulations in action, check out my channel on YouTube. Don’t miss Birds on [...]
Hello complex systems enthusiasts and good morning.
It is 06:07 now, meaning that it’s less then 3 hours untill a new ICECCS (International Conference on Complex Computer Systems) session gets underway in Oxford. Collocated with ICECCS is the CoSMoS special session, organised by Paul Andrews, Fiona Polack and Adam Sampson.
Looking through the proceedings, I can see we have quite an interesting day ahead of us. Here are just a few examples of papers to be presented:
Stibor T and Salazar-Banuelos A, “On Immunological Memory as a Function of a Recursive Proliferation Process“: essentially authors present a grid-based model of recursive proliferation of cells, and claim it explains immunological memory. The model is explicitely validated throuh simulation and reference to immunological literature.
Kremers E, Viejo P, Barambones O and de Durana J G, “A Complex Systems Modelling Approach for Decentralised Simulation of Electric Microgrids“: [...]
This year we are delighted to have Prof. Paul Humphreys as our invited speaker. Our York research associate Paul Andrews has been telling us for some time about Prof. Humphreys’ book “Extending Ourselves”, so it will be interesting to hear what the man himself has to say!
The title of his talk will be “Some Relations between Formal Structure and Conceptual Content in Simulations”.
Abstract
One of the striking features of complex systems modelling, and simulation more generally, is the ability in many cases to transfer models across domains of application. Models using fitness landscapes that originated in population biology can be used in agent based models in economics, abstract computations developed for Boolean algebras can be mapped onto dilute spin glass models, and Ising models from condensed matter physics have been used to model the synchronization of firefly flashing in certain species. This feature, which derives from the [...]
Science is, in theory, “nice and principled”. We have the scientific method to guide experimentation, we have null hypothesis testing, so one could say nothing can really go wrong. What we get is what is “out there”. That is in theory, of course…
Coming back to good-old reality, things are not exactly perfect. First of all, we have the omnipresent sampling effect – our certainty over particular experimental results is always limited by measurement errors. Secondly, the way data is aggregated and conclusions drawn, may be biased: assumptions taken for granted, methods that are not really applicable to the given context, etc. Transparency is an issue. Finally, one of the biggest fish in the pond is the issue of scaling: drawing conclusions for large-scale systems, from small-scale observations.
From all this cloud of dust, argumentation techniques come to the rescue. They have been around for some time, especially in the domain [...]
