Complexity | Chris Aldrich

🔖 NetSci 2018 11-15 June 2018 in Paris, France

Bookmarked NetSci 2018 (NetSci 2018)

NetSci 2018, the flagship conference of the Network Science Society, aims to bring together leading researchers and practitioners working in the emerging area of network science. The conference fosters interdisciplinary communication and collaboration in network science research across computer and information sciences, physics, mathematics, statistics, the life sciences, neuroscience, environmental sciences, social sciences, finance and business, arts and design. NetSci 2018 in Paris, France will be a combination of: * An International School for students and non-experts (June 11-12, 2018) * Satellite Symposia (June 11-12, 2018) * A 3-day Conference (June 13-15, 2018) featuring research in a wide range of topics and in different formats, including keynote and invited talks, oral presentations, posters, and lightning talks.

Registration Deadlines:
February 8: Registration opens.
March 20: Registration for presenters of accepted contributions ends.
April 10: Early registration ends.
May 28: Online registration ends.

🔖 9th International Conference on Complex Systems | NECSI

Bookmarked 9th International Conference on Complex Systems | NECSI (necsi.edu)

The International Conference on Complex Systems is a unique interdisciplinary forum that unifies and bridges the traditional domains of science and a multitude of real world systems. Participants will contribute and be exposed to mind expanding concepts and methods from across the diverse field of complex systems science. The conference will be held July 22-27, 2018, in Cambridge, MA, USA. Special Topic - Artificial Intelligence: This year’s conference will include a day on AI, including its development and potential future. This session will be chaired by Iyad Rahwan of MIT's Media Lab.

A great looking conference coming up with a strong line up of people who’s work I appreciate. It could certainly use some more balance however as it’s almost all white men.

In particular I’d want to see:
Albert-László Barabási (Northeastern University, USA)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Real World Risk Institute, USA)
Stuart Kauffman (Institute for Systems Biology, USA)
Simon DeDeo (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Research)
César Hidalgo (MIT Media Lab, USA)

Others include:
Marta González (University of California Berkeley, USA)
Peter Turchin (University of Connecticut, USA)
Mercedes Pascual (University of Chicago, USA) Pending confirmation
Iyad Rahwan (MIT Media Lab, USA)
Sandy Pentland (MIT Media Lab, USA)
Theresa Whelan (U.S. Department of Defense) Pending DOD approval
H. Eugene Stanley (Boston University, USA)
Ricardo Hausmann (Harvard University, USA)
Stephen Grossberg (Boston University, USA)
Daniela Rus (MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab, USA) Pending confirmation
Olaf Sporns (Indiana University Network Science Institute, USA)
Michelle Girvan (University of Maryland, USA) Pending confirmation
Cameron Kerry (MIT Media Lab, USA)
Irving Epstein (Brandeis University, USA)

📖 Read pages 19-52 of The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life by Nick Lane

📖 Read Chapter 1: What is Life? pages 19-52 in The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life by Nick Lane (W.W. Norton,
2015, ISBN: 978-0393088816)

Lane lays out a “brief” history of the 4 billion years of life on Earth. Discusses isotopic fractionation and other evidence that essentially shows a bottleneck between bacteria and archaea (procaryotes) on the one hand and eucaryotes on the other, the latter of which all must have had a single common ancestor based on the genetic profiles we currently see. He suggest that while we should see even more diversity of complex life, we do not, and he hints at the end of the chapter that the reason is energy.

In general, it’s much easier to follow than I anticipated it might be. His writing style is lucid and fluid and he has some lovely prose not often seen in books of this sort. It’s quite a pleasure to read. Additionally he’s doing a very solid job of building an argument in small steps.

I’m watching closely how he’s repeatedly using the word information in his descriptions, and it seems to be a much more universal and colloquial version than the more technical version, but something interesting may come out of it from my philosophical leanings. I can’t wait to get further into the book to see how things develop.

📗 Started reading The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life by Nick Lane

📗 Started reading pages 1-18 Introduction: Why is Life the Way it is in The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life by Nick Lane

A quick, but interesting peek into where he intends to go. He lays out some quick background here in the opening. He’s generally a very lucid writer so far. Can’t wait to get in further.

Some may feel like some of the terminology is a hurdle in the opening, so I hope he circles around to define some of his terms a bit better for the audience I suspect he’s trying to reach.

Energy and Matter at the Origins of Life by Nick Lane | Santa Fe Institute

Bookmarked Energy and Matter at the Origin of Life by Nick Lane (Santa Fe Institute Community Event (YouTube))

All living things are made of cells, and all cells are powered by electrochemical charges across thin lipid membranes — the ‘proton motive force.’ We know how these electrical charges are generated by protein machines at virtually atomic resolution, but we know very little about how membrane bioenergetics first arose. By tracking back cellular evolution to the last universal common ancestor and beyond, scientist Nick Lane argues that geologically sustained electrochemical charges across semiconducting barriers were central to both energy flow and the formation of new organic matter — growth — at the very origin of life. Dr. Lane is a professor of evolutionary biochemistry in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London. His research focuses on how energy flow constrains evolution from the origin of life to the traits of complex multicellular organisms. He is a co-director of the new Centre for Life’s Origins and Evolution (CLOE) at UCL, and author of four celebrated books on life’s origins and evolution. His work has been recognized by the Biochemical Society Award in 2015 and the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize in 2016.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmLLo0WC5xg

h/t Santa Fe Institute

The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis by Alan Turing

Reposted a tweet by Michael Nielsen (Twitter)

According to Google Scholar, Turing's paper inventing modern computing is only his _second_ most cited paper pic.twitter.com/T1M4k4dMYK

— michael_nielsen (@michael_nielsen) October 7, 2015

Looks like Alan Turing, like Claude Shannon, was interested in microbiology too! I’ll have to dig into this. [pdf]

👓 A 2017 Nobel laureate says he left science because he ran out of money and was fed up with academia | QZ

Read A 2017 Nobel laureate left science because he ran out of money (Quartz)

Jeffrey Hall, a retired professor at Brandeis University, shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in medicine for discoveries elucidating how our internal body clock works. He was honored along with Michael Young and his close collaborator Michael Roshbash. Hall said in an interview from his home in rural Maine that he collaborated with Roshbash because they shared...

This is an all-too-often heard story. The difference is that now a Nobel Prize winner is telling it about himself!

SFI and ASU to offer online M.S. in Complexity | Complexity Explorer

Bookmarked SFI and ASU to offer online M.S. in Complexity (Complexity Explorer)

SFI and Arizona State University soon will offer the world’s first comprehensive online master’s degree in complexity science. It will be the Institute’s first graduate degree program, a vision that dates to SFI’s founding. “With technology, a growing recognition of the value of online education, widespread acceptance of complexity science, and in partnership with ASU, we are now able to offer the world a degree in the field we helped invent,” says SFI President David Krakauer, “and it will be taught by the very people who built it into a legitimate domain of scholarship.”

🔖 Self-Organized Resonance during Search of a Diverse Chemical Space

Bookmarked Self-Organized Resonance during Search of a Diverse Chemical Space (Physical Review Letters)

ABSTRACT Recent studies of active matter have stimulated interest in the driven self-assembly of complex structures. Phenomenological modeling of particular examples has yielded insight, but general thermodynamic principles unifying the rich diversity of behaviors observed have been elusive. Here, we study the stochastic search of a toy chemical space by a collection of reacting Brownian particles subject to periodic forcing. We observe the emergence of an adaptive resonance in the system matched to the drive frequency, and show that the increased work absorption by these resonant structures is key to their stabilization. Our findings are consistent with a recently proposed thermodynamic mechanism for far-from-equilibrium self-organization.

Suggested by First Support for a Physics Theory of Life in Quanta Magazine.

📺 A Universal Theory of Life: Math, Art & Information by Sara Walker

Watched A Universal Theory of Life: Math, Art & Information from TEDxASU

Dr. Walker introduces the concept of information, then proposes that information may be a necessity for biological complexity in this thought-provoking talk on the origins of life. Sara is a theoretical physicist and astrobiologist, researching the origins and nature of life. She is particularly interested in addressing the question of whether or not “other laws of physics” might govern life, as first posed by Erwin Schrodinger in his famous book What is life?. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University. She is also Fellow of the ASU -Santa Fe Institute Center for Biosocial Complex Systems, Founder of the astrobiology-themed social website SAGANet.org, and is a member of the Board of Directors of Blue Marble Space. She is active in public engagement in science, with recent appearances on “Through the Wormhole” and NPR’s Science Friday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXnt79JhrbY

Admittedly, she only had a few short minutes, but it would have been nice if she’d started out with a precise definition of information. I suspect the majority of her audience didn’t know the definition with which she’s working and it would have helped focus the talk.

Her description of Speigelman’s Monster was relatively interesting and not very often seen in much of the literature that covers these areas.

I wouldn’t rate this very highly as a TED Talk as it wasn’t as condensed and simplistic as most, nor was it as hyper-focused, but then again condensing this area into 11 minutes is far from simple task. I do love that she’s excited enough about the topic that she almost sounds a little out of breath towards the end.

There’s an excellent Eddington quote I’ve mentioned before that would have been apropos to have opened up her presentation that might have brought things into higher relief given her talk title:

Suppose that we were asked to arrange the following in two categories–

distance, mass, electric force, entropy, beauty, melody.

I think there are the strongest grounds for placing entropy alongside beauty and melody and not with the first three.

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, OM, FRS (1882-1944), a British astronomer, physicist, and mathematician
in The Nature of the Physical World, 1927

🔖 The hidden simplicity of biology by Paul C W Davies and Sara Imari Walker | Reports on Progress in Physics

Bookmarked The hidden simplicity of biology (Reports on Progress in Physics)

Life is so remarkable, and so unlike any other physical system, that it is tempting to attribute special factors to it. Physics is founded on the assumption that universal laws and principles underlie all natural phenomena, but is it far from clear that there are 'laws of life' with serious descriptive or predictive power analogous to the laws of physics. Nor is there (yet) a 'theoretical biology' in the same sense as theoretical physics. Part of the obstacle in developing a universal theory of biological organization concerns the daunting complexity of living organisms. However, many attempts have been made to glimpse simplicity lurking within this complexity, and to capture this simplicity mathematically. In this paper we review a promising new line of inquiry to bring coherence and order to the realm of biology by focusing on 'information' as a unifying concept.

Downloadable free copy available on ResearchGate.

🔖 The “Hard Problem” of Life by Sara Imari Walker & Paul C.W. Davies

Bookmarked The "Hard Problem" of Life (arXiv)

Chalmer's famously identified pinpointing an explanation for our subjective experience as the "hard problem of consciousness". He argued that subjective experience constitutes a "hard problem" in the sense that its explanation will ultimately require new physical laws or principles. Here, we propose a corresponding "hard problem of life" as the problem of how `information' can affect the world. In this essay we motivate both why the problem of information as a causal agent is central to explaining life, and why it is hard - that is, why we suspect that a full resolution of the hard problem of life will, similar to as has been proposed for the hard problem of consciousness, ultimately not be reducible to known physical principles. Comments: To appear in "From Matter to Life: Information and Causality". S.I. Walker, P.C.W. Davies and G.F.R. Ellis (eds). Cambridge University Press

🔖 The Algorithmic Origins of Life – Sara Walker (SETI Talks)

Bookmarked The Algorithmic Origins of Life by Sara I. Walker (SETI Institute Talks)

The origin of life is arguably one of the greatest unanswered questions in science. A primary challenge is that without a proper definition for life -- a notoriously challenging problem in its own right -- the problem of how life began is not well posed. Here we propose that the transition from non-life to life may correspond to a fundamental shift in causal structure, where information gains direct, and context-dependent, causal efficacy over matter, a transition that may be mapped to a nontrivial distinction in how living systems process information. Dr. Walker will discuss potential measures of such a transition, which may be amenable to laboratory study, and how the proposed mechanism corresponds to the onset of the unique mode of (algorithmic) information processing characteristic of living systems.

https://youtu.be/dPiI4nYD0Vg

🔖 Origins of Life: A Problem for Physics

Bookmarked Origins of Life: A Problem for Physics by Sara I. Walker (arXiv)

The origins of life stands among the great open scientific questions of our time. While a number of proposals exist for possible starting points in the pathway from non-living to living matter, these have so far not achieved states of complexity that are anywhere near that of even the simplest living systems. A key challenge is identifying the properties of living matter that might distinguish living and non-living physical systems such that we might build new life in the lab. This review is geared towards covering major viewpoints on the origin of life for those new to the origin of life field, with a forward look towards considering what it might take for a physical theory that universally explains the phenomenon of life to arise from the seemingly disconnected array of ideas proposed thus far. The hope is that a theory akin to our other theories in fundamental physics might one day emerge to explain the phenomenon of life, and in turn finally permit solving its origins.