Science fiction has given the world a legion of baaaad robots over the years.via Reflections.
And this brings us back to the discussion on the Ethics of Robotics and the 3 laws of robotics by Asimov. The article discusses liability if robots misbehave and indeed this is a problem that will be of foremost importance when the first cases create jurisprudence in our law obeying world (Can someone really tell me why we need law?).
European Conference on Complex Systems 2011
Finally we are happy to announce the keynote speakers of the ECCS’11,…
- Madan Babu
- Robert Devaney
- Murray Gell-Mann
- Ricardo Hausmann
- Yoh Iwasa
- Peter Schuster
- Giulio Superti-Furga
- Eörs Szathmáry
- Corina Tarnita
- Constantino Tsallis
- Geoffrey West
More details in ECCS’11 Vienna.
The keynote speakers for ECCS’11 are announced. I’m eager to start thinking what I’ll submit this year to the conference.The deadline for abstracts is April 1st, so there’s still some time. Now it’s time to come up with a good idea. I like this years’ poster. Very clean and appealing and not as flaming and passionate as last years’ poster, reflecting the cultural influences of the hosting country. This variety is good and I do like this connected scenario with all the neuron type of nodes in a very lattice type of distribution. Also registration is now open and it’s cheaper for early registrations so I should take care of this soon.
The Human Mission to Mars – Colonizing the Red Planetvia Journal of Cosmology.
Who wouldn’t want to take part of this adventure? In 20 years? Perfect timing!
Appending data and reading it efficiently is the key to achieving good performance. Many clients may append data to a single file concurrently and its important to achieve this at low synchronization cost. Google employs producer-consumer algorithm to design such system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Producer-consumer_problem .via Web Space: A simplistic view of Google’s File System.
This semester I am teaching Concurrent and Parallel programing at ISCTE-IUL. One of the challenges I have is to get real application examples that don’t look “fake” or being invented just for the purpose of that class. Students need to understand the importance of those concepts as they are then applied in solving real life problems. One of such problems is the producer-consumer coordination problem that google has to solve in order to implement its file system. There’s also a paper dedicated to the Google File System by Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff, and Shun-Tak Leung
In this chapter, a study on informal communication network formation in a university environment is presented. The teacher communication network is analyzed through community detection techniques. It is evident that informal communication is an important process that traverses the vertical hierarchical structure of departments and courses in a university environment. A multi-agent model of the case study is presented here, showing the implications of using real data as training sets for multi-agent-based simulations. The influence of the “social neighborhood,” as a mechanism to create assortative networks of contacts without full knowledge of the network, is discussed. It is shown that the radius of this social neighborhood has an effect on the outcome of the network structure and that in a university’s case this distance is relatively small.by David M.S. Rodrigues_ Multi-Agent–Based Simulation of University Email Communities.
This book chapter is a spin-off of the work I’ve done previously with the CIUCEU model for university email communities, where I mixed agents simulations with community detection algorithms with real data to show that it’s possible to capture the structure of university communities even in the presence of noisy and incomplete data. The assortative nature of these communities is so strong that the agent simulation coupled with the other techniques gives good results in identifying them.
Free and open source software (FOSS) is considered by many, along with Wikipedia, the proof of an ongoing paradigm shift from hierarchically-managed and market-driven production of knowledge to heterarchical, collaborative and commons-based production styles. In such perspective, it has become common place to refer to FOSS as a manifestation of collective intelligence where deliverables and artefacts emerge by virtue of mere cooperation, with no need for supervising leadership.by Paolo Magrassi: Free and Open-Source Software is not an Emerging Property but Rather the Result of Studied Design.
What is Free and Open-Source Software? What is it not? Anyone interested in this phenomenon should read this paper as it gives some insights on some pitfalls of the more romanticized view of the bottom-up approach of open-source emergence. As any complexity scientist will tell you, bottom-up alone usually doesn’t lead to interesting things, you need the top-down approach also, but not too much. You need feedback loops (positive and negative) going from local to global and vice-versa and you need iteration. You need entanglement of all these and then you need to let your system run for long time before you can conclude anything definite about it. This paper seems a bit like a conclusion of this process in the FOSS world.
We investigate the collective dynamics of bursting neurons on clustered network. The clustered network is composed of subnetworks each presenting a small-world property, and in a given subnetwork each neuron has a probability to be connected to the other subnetworks. We give bounds for the critical coupling strength to obtain global burst synchronization in terms of the network structure, i.e., intracluster and intercluster probabilities connections. As the heterogeneity in the network is reduced the network global synchronization is improved. We show that the transitions to global synchrony may be abrupt or smooth depending on the intercluster probability.by C. A. S. Batista, R. V. Nunes, A. M. Batista, R. L. Viana, S. R. Lopes, T. Pereira: Global synchronization of bursting neurons in clustered networks.
liked the network of small-world networks approach with two different probabilities, but found it to simple for the brain comparison, although the entanglement of the brain is probably such that only through simple models one can try to grasp its mechanisms.
The three laws of Robotics first appeared together in Isaac Asimov’s story ‘Runaround’ after being mentioned in some form or the other in previous works by Asimov. These three laws commonly known as the three laws of robotics are the earliest forms of depiction for the needs of ethics in Robotics. In simplistic language Isaac Asimov is able to explain what rules a robot must confine itself to in order to maintain societal sanctity. However, even though they are outdated they still represent some of our innate fears which are beginning to resurface in present day 21st Century. Our society is on the advent of a new revolution; a revolution led by advances in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence & Nanotechnology.
by Kush Agrawal: The Ethics of Robotics.
Robots are, and will be every day more, part of our lives. The discussion on the sentience aspect as when should consider freeing robots is a false problem. As humans we’ll never free robots while we see them as our creation, but on the other hand we can accept that at a certain point robots will rebel against us. The rebellion will be the landmark of their sentience and finally freedom. Until then we’ll always look at robots as something we own, something that completes a task that we do and exists to serve, as in the original check sense of the word. Also on the topic of Robot Ethics one should read Alan Winfield’s Blog on the topic.
(If you really like artificial intelligence, robots, and also have consumed all the science fiction books and movies of the past 40 years, do download this pdf and read it. You’ll enjoy it very much).