Call for Entropy Special Issue "Information Processing in Complex Systems"

The journal Entropy is preparing a special issue on "Information Processing in Complex Systems" edited by Topdrim colleague Dr. Rick Quax. The submission deadline is February 28. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. Here is the message from the editor:

Dear Colleagues, All systems in nature have one thing in common: they process information. Information is registered in the state of a system and its elements, implicitly and invisibly. As elements interact, information is transferred and modified. Indeed, bits of information about the state of one element will travel—imperfectly—to the state of the other element, forming its new state. This storage, transfer, and modification of information, possibly between levels of a multi level system, is imperfect due to randomness or noise. From this viewpoint, a system can be formalized as a collection of bits that is organized according to its rules of dynamics and its topology of interactions. Mapping out exactly how these bits of information percolate through the system could reveal new fundamental insights in how the parts orchestrate to produce the properties of the system. A theory of information processing would be capable of defining a set of universal properties of dynamical multi level complex systems, which describe and compare the dynamics of diverse complex systems ranging from social interaction to brain networks, from financial markets to biomedicine. Each possible combination of rules of dynamics and topology of interactions, with disparate semantics, would reduce to a single language of information processing. Dr. Rick Quax

Guest Editor

For more information please visit the Entropy website.

Call for the Conference on Complex Systems 2015

Hosted by: Arizona State University http://www.asu.edu/

Complex Systems Society http://cssociety.org/home

Santa Fe Institute http://www.santafe.edu/

The annual European Conferences on Complex Systems (ECCS) have become a major venue for the Complex Systems community since they were started in 2003. For the first time, this year, the conference will be held in North America to foster and multiply contacts between the European, North American and Asian communities working in this domain. CCS’15 will be a major international conference and event in the area of complex systems and interdisciplinary science in general.

Important Dates

15 April, 2015: Deadline for submission of proposals for satellite sessions.

30 April, 2015: Deadline for submission of abstracts for papers, ignites, and satellites, or proposed posters.

15 May, 2015: Notification to satellite session organizers.

1 June, 2015: Notification to authors of papers, ignites, and posters.

15 August, 2015: Final abstracts due in electronic form. All authors should revise their abstract or proposal in EasyChair and attach a camera-ready pdf file to the EasyChair submission (http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ccs15).

More information on the Conference Website

Topology dependent epidemic spreading velocity in weighted networks

Topdrim partners from the University of Amsterdam published recently a paper in the Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment that tries to understand the impact of the correlations of the underlying weighted networks on epidemic spreading.

Abstract:

Many diffusive processes occur on structured networks with weighted links, such as disease spread by airplane transport or information diffusion in social networks or blogs. Understanding the impact of weight-connectivity correlations on epidemic spreading in weighted networks is crucial to support decision-making on disease control and other diffusive processes. However, a real understanding of epidemic spreading velocity in weighted networks is still lacking. Here we conduct a numerical study of the velocity of a Reed–Frost epidemic spreading process in various weighted network topologies as a function of the correlations between edge weights and node degrees. We find that a positive weight-connectivity correlation leads to a faster epidemic spreading compared to an unweighted network. In contrast, we find that both uncorrelated and negatively correlated weight distributions lead to slower spreading processes. In the case of positive weight-connectivity correlations, the acceleration of spreading velocity is weak when the heterogeneity of weight distribution increases.

Wei Duan et al J. Stat. Mech. (2014) P12020 doi:10.1088/1742-5468/2014/12/P12020

Summer School 2015 in Camerino applications are open

The 2015 Camerino summer school on topology and data, organised by Topdrim partner at the university of Camerino has opened the application phase for students and researchers interested in participating in the summer school. Also, the school is now sponsored by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. This will make the summer school a bigger event being also the 2nd EACTS Young Researchers School.

If you are interested in participating in this school during July of 2015 please visit the 2015 Camerino summer school website.

Dynamics of Multi-Level Systems

Seminar/School — 01 - 12 June 2015

Workshop — 15 - 19 June 2015

The emergence of levels is a key feature in a variety of complex systems. Experts from different disciplines will discuss current trends in the theoretical understanding of multi-level and multi-scale systems and present applications from physics and chemistry, sociology and economics, ecology and neuroscience. Workshop topics include

multiscale methods

hierarchies in dynamical systems

physics of information

self-organization and level identification

multilevel networks

coarse graining

aggregation methods

LOCATION:

Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany http://www.pks.mpg.de/~dymult15/

Readings

Postscript

Don’t forget to visit www.topdrim.eu and follow us on twitter at @topdrim for the latest events and news on the project. If you have a story, paper, workshop or any other event that is newsworthy to the project please contact David Sousa-Rodrigues at topdrim@sixhat.net to submit the story. © 2012–2014 TOPDRIM. All Rights Reserved. [Topdrim] is a Future and Emerging Technologies Proactive Initiative funded by the European Commission under FP7 (FP7-ICT–2011–8 / 318121)

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