
Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series
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Speaker Schedule
Unless otherwise specified, seminars are held on Fridays from 12-1 p.m. in Harder House Room 104 throughout Fall and Winter terms. For those taking the seminar for credit, grading is based on attendance, either in-person or remote.
CONTACT US: If you have questions, comments, or topic/speaker suggestions, or if you would like to present a seminar, please email Wayne Wakeland.
SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENT LISTSERV: To receive seminar announcements, you can join our mailing list. If that doesn't work, please email Wayne Wakeland.
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Complexity Theory and Political Change: Talcott Parsons Occupies Wall Street
Martin Zwick
1-27-2012
Complexity theory can assist our understanding of social systems and social phenomena. This paper illustrates this assertion by linking Talcott Parsons' model of societal structure to the Occupy Wall Street ...Read More
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New Ways to Manage Information as a Good that Improves with Use
Ida Kubiszewski
11-4-2011
Information has some unique characteristics. Unlike most other goods and services, it is neither rival (use by one prevents use by others) nor non-rival (use by one does not affect ...Read More
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Participatory Action Research: Science and Social Change
Dora Raymaker
10-28-2011
Participatory Action Research (PAR) is a general collaborative approach to inquiry that includes research "subjects" as members of the research team. Useful in any setting involving groups of people, PAR ...Read More
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Instructional Practices for Teaching Systems Concepts
Dario Nardi
10-7-2011
15-minute presentations on the following three topics:
I. Live Group Simulations Promote Learning of Systems Concepts
Systems concepts such as attractors, bifurcation, chaotic behavior, and emergence may be hard for learners to ...Read More -
Evolving Machine Morality Strategies through Multiagent Simulations
David Burke
6-3-2011
There is a general consensus among robotics researchers that the world of the future will be filled with autonomous and semi-autonomous machines. There is less of a consensus, though, on ...Read More
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Systems Ideas for the Scientific and Societal Imperatives of the Coastal Ocean: Case of the BP Oil Gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, Spring & Summer 2010
Christopher Mooers
5-27-2011
In recent decades, great progress has been made in advancing the scientific understanding of the coastal ocean (i.e., the 200 nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ)) across a broad set ...Read More
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Hardware Acceleration of Inference Computing: The Numenta HTM Algorithm
Dan Hammerstrom
5-13-2011
In this presentation I will describe the latest version of the Numenta HTM Cortical Learning Algorithm and why it is interesting for doing research into radical new computer architectures. Then ...Read More
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Regional Trade Agreements and the Pattern of Trade: A Networks Approach
Rossitza Wooster, Javier A. Reyes, and Stuart Shirell
4-29-2011
This paper uses a complex network approach for the analysis of bilateral trade data between countries over the period 1970-2000. We compute the network community structure for every year between ...Read More
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Integer Optimization and Computational Algebraic Topology
Bala Krishnamoorthy
4-22-2011
We present recently discovered connections between integer optimization, or integer programming (IP), and homology. Under reasonable assumptions, these results lead to efficient solutions of several otherwise hard-to-solve problems from computational ...Read More
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Systems Views of the Economics of Sustainable Development
Joshua Hughes
4-15-2011
The mainstream economics of the 20th century (and now 21st century) has often failed to predict what will happen--or explain what has happened--in the real world, even with (or because ...Read More
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Higher-level Application of Adaptive Dynamic Programming/reinforcement Learning – A Next phase for Controls and System Identification?
George G. Lendaris
4-8-2011
Humans have the ability to make use of experience while performing system identification and selecting control actions for changing situations. In contrast to current technological implementations that slow down as ...Read More
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Building a Decision Aid Right-side-out
Barry F. Anderson
4-1-2011
Tools have long been available for improving decision making, yet people who have knowledge of these tools seem reluctant to use them. I consider multiple reasons why this might be ...Read More
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Modal Logic and its Applications, Explained using Puzzles and Examples
Marek Perkowski
3-4-2011
The talk introduces Modal Logic as an extension of classical propositional and First Order Logics. We discuss motivations of Lewis to create modal logic system, axioms and rules of proof. ...Read More
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The Illicit Arms Trade: A Social Network Analysis
David Todd Kinsella
3-4-2011
In recent years, researchers have increasingly turned their attention to the proliferation of small arms and light weapons. Small arms are difficult to track and are not the stuff of ...Read More
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Some Problems and Solutions in the Experimental Science of Technology: The Proper Use and Reporting of Statistics in Computational Intelligence, with an Experimental Design from Computational Ethnomusicology
Mehmet Vurkaç
2-25-2011
Statistics is the meta-science that lends validity and credibility to The Scientific Method. However, as a complex and advanced Science in itself, Statistics is often misunderstood and misused by scientists, ...Read More
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Optimality in Neural Adaptation
Adrienne Fairhall
2-18-2011
Nervous systems tune themselves to the statistical structure of the stimuli they encounter. This sensitivity to statistics appears in phenomena ranging over many timescales, from the adaptation of vision to ...Read More
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On the Effect of Criticality and Topology on Learning in Random Boolean Networks
Alireza Goudarzi
1-28-2011
Random Boolean networks (RBN) are discrete dynamical systems composed of N automata with a binary state, each of which interacts with other automata in the network. RBNs were originally introduced ...Read More
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Information Disclosure and Environmental Performance
Mark Stephan
1-21-2011
Scholars and policymakers increasingly argue that information disclosure programs such as the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) should be used to supplement conventional environmental regulation. Yet we lack a clear understanding ...Read More
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Random Automata Networks: Why Playing Dice is not a Vice
Christof Teuscher
12-3-2010
Random automata networks consist of a set of simple compute nodes interacting with each other. In this generic model, one or multiple model parameters, such as the the node interactions ...Read More
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The 'Goldilocks Hypothesis' : A Political Ecology of the Land-sparing/Wildlife-friendly Farming Debate
M. Jahi Chappell
11-19-2010
Proposals for biodiversity conservation as related to the dominant form of human land use, agriculture, have broadly coalesced around two paradigms: "Land sparing" and "Wildlife-friendly farming." Neither paradigm is sufficiently ...Read More
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Gender and the Social Structure of Collaboration
Kjersten Bunker Whittington
11-12-2010
Previous research demonstrates that individuals’ network positions in their surrounding social structure of relations influence the extent of their output and performance. The unique situation of minority groups complicates the ...Read More
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The Limits of Control, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Regulation (Discussion)
Joshua Hughes
11-5-2010
When we want to solve a problem, we talk about how we might manage or regulate—control it. Control is a a central concept in systems science, along with system, environment, ...Read More
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Neural Coding and Decoding
Alexander Dimitrov
10-29-2010
Methods based on Rate Distortion theory have been successfully used to cluster stimuli and neural responses in order to study neural codes at a level of detail supported by the ...Read More
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Understanding, Modeling and Valuing Ecosystem Services
Robert Costanza
10-22-2010
Ecosystem services (ES) are the direct and indirect contributions of ecosystems (in combination with other inputs) to human well-being. An ES-based approach can assess the trade-offs inherent in managing humans ...Read More
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How a Systems Engineer Starts...
Herman Migliore
10-15-2010
Dr. Migliore will review systems engineering as a process for developing products, processes, and services and suggest views that encourage systems thinking. As an example, he will focus on the ...Read More