GSO-2013

Sixth International Workshop on
Guided Self-Organization (GSO-2013)

The 6th International Workshop on Guided Self-Organization is a satellite Workshop at the 2013 European Conference on Complex Systems which takes place in Barcelona during 16-20 September 2013. The Complex Systems Society sponsors this annual event. GSO-2013 takes place on 18 September 2013 (Barcelona, Spain).

Research Aims and Topics

The goal of Guided Self-Organization (GSO) is to leverage the strengths of self-organization while still being able to direct the outcome of the self-organizing process. GSO typically has the following features: (i) an increase in organization (structure and/or functionality) over some time; (ii) the local interactions are not explicitly guided by any external agent; (iii) task-independent objectives are combined with task-dependent constraints.

Of particular interest are well-founded, but general methods for characterizing such systems in a principled way with the view of ultimately allowing them to be guided toward pre-specified goals. Information theory, nonlinear dynamics and graph theory are core to many of these methods, and quantifying complexity and its sources is a common theme.

A number of attempts have been made to formalize aspects of GSO within information theory and dynamical systems: empowerment, information-driven evolution, robust overdesign, reinforcement-driven homeokinesis, predictive information-based homeokinesis, interactive learning, etc. What is common to many examples of GSO is the characterization of a system-environment loop in information-theoretic terms. However, the lack of a broadly applicable mathematical framework across multiple scales and contexts leaves GSO methodology incomplete. Devising such a framework and identifying common principles of guidance are the main themes of the GSO-2013 workshop, continuing the tradition established at previous GSO Workshops: GSO-2008 (Sydney, Australia), GSO-2009 (Leipzig, Germany), GSO-2010 (Bloomington, USA), GSO-2011 (Hatfield, UK), and GSO-2012 (Sydney, Australia).

The GSO-2013 workshop will bring together invited experts and researchers in self-organizing systems, with particular emphasis on the information- and graph-theoretic foundations of GSO and the information dynamics of adaptive systems. The following topics are of special interest: information-theoretic measures of complexity, nonlinear dynamics, complex networks, information-driven self-organization (IDSO), applications of GSO to complex networks, distributed computation, machine learning, swarm intelligence, bio-inspired systems, computational neuroscience, systems biology, cooperative and modular robotics, etc.

The program includes 1 day, with three keynote talks and ten regular presentations.

Organising Committee

Mikhail Prokopenko, CSIRO, Australia, co-chair
Carlos Gershenson, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México, co-chair

Daniel Polani, University of Hertfordshire, UK, co-chair

Program Committee

Carlos Gershenson, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México
Joschka Boedecker, University of Freiburg, Germany
Nihat Ay, Planck Institute for Mathematics in The Sciences, Germany, and Santa Fe Institute, USA
Joseph Lizier, CSIRO, Australia
Oliver Obst, CSIRO, Australia

Daniel Polani, University of Hertfordshire, UK
Mikhail Prokopenko, CSIRO, Australia
Martin Riedmiller, University of Freiburg, Germany
Louis Rossi, University of Delaware, USA
Ivan Tanev, Doshisha University, Japan
Larry Yaeger, Google, USA

Keynote Speakers

Prof. Dr. Fumiya Iida, Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems, ETH, Zürich
Prof. Dr. Marc Timme, Department of Nonlinear Dynamics, The Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen

Prof. Paul F.M.J. Verschure, Catalan Institution for Advanced Research Studies (ICREA) and Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona