Related papers: Bio-Inspired Political Systems. Opening a Field
Power systems are susceptible to natural threats including hurricanes and floods. Modern power grids are also increasingly threatened by cyber attacks. Existing approaches that help improve power system security and resilience may not be…
Natural selection favors the more successful individuals. This is the elementary premise that pervades common models of evolution. Under extreme conditions, however, the process may no longer be probabilistic. Those that meet certain…
In biological systems, the capacity of anticipation--that is, entertaining a model of the system within the system--can be considered as naturally given. Human languages enable psychological systems to construct and exchange mental models…
The applicability of computational models to the biological world is an active topic of debate. We argue that a useful path forward results from abandoning hard boundaries between categories and adopting an observer-dependent, pragmatic…
Bio-digital systems that merge microbial life with technology promise new modes of computation, combining biological adaptability with digital precision. Yet realizing this potential symbiotically -- where biological and digital agents…
Unprecedented imbalances and growing human impacts characterize the Anthropocene. It highlights the urgency of better choices, and the perspectives outlined here can inform our decision-making process. The Biocentric-Technological way…
The collective decision-making exhibited by animal groups provides enormous inspiration for multi-agent control system design as it embodies several features that are desirable in engineered networks, including robustness and adaptability,…
What determines biodiversity in nature is a prominent issue in ecology, especially in biotic resource systems that are typically devoid of cross-feeding. Here, we show that by incorporating pairwise encounters among consumer individuals…
A century ago, John Dewey observed that '[s]team and electricity have done more to alter the conditions under which men associate together than all the agencies which affected human relationships before our time'. In the last few decades,…
The concept of evolutionary development of structures constituted a \emph{real} revolution in biology: it was possible to understand how the very complex structures of life can arise in an out-of-equilibrium system. The investigation of…
Self-organization is the generation of order out of local interactions in non-equilibrium [1]. It is deeply connected to all fields of science from physics, chemistry to biology where functional living structures self-assemble[2] and…
Biological systems are generally complicated and/or complex. In the former approach, one sets up a model with a large number of parameters to describe the system in detail. The latter approach focuses on understanding the universal aspects…
Robustness, the ability of a system to maintain performance under significant and unanticipated environmental changes, is a critical property for robotic systems. While biological systems naturally exhibit robustness, there is no…
We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems, which are considered to be robust, self-organising and scalable architectures that can…
The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…
The vision of Organic Computing addresses challenges that arise in the design of future information systems that are comprised of numerous, heterogeneous, resource-constrained and error-prone components or devices. Here, the notion organic…
The dynamics of political opinion are a critical component of modern society with large-scale implications for the evolution of intra- and international political discourse and policy. Here we utilize recent high-resolution survey data to…
Species-rich communities, such as the microbiota or microbial ecosystems, provide key functions for human health and climatic resilience. Increasing effort is being dedicated to design experimental protocols for selecting community-level…
The infrastructure upon which the functioning of society depends is composed of complex ecosystems of systems. Consequently, we must reason about the properties of such ecosystems, which requires that we construct models of them. There are…
The improbability of a spontaneously generated self-assembling molecule has suggested that life began with a set of simpler, collectively replicating elements, such as an enclosed autocatalytic set of polymers (or protocell). Since…