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Life depends as much on the flow of information as on the flow of energy. Here we review the many efforts to make this intuition precise. Starting with the building blocks of information theory, we explore examples where it has been…
In this paper we will try to provide a formalization of some characteristics of the development of biological systems aiming at the highest level of adequacy: justificative adequacy, that is, not only what we observe (descriptive adequacy)…
Biological systems exhibit two structural features on many levels of organization: sparseness, in which only a small fraction of possible interactions between components actually occur; and modularity - the near decomposability of the…
Living systems, particularly multicellular systems, often seem hopelessly complex. But recent studies have suggested that beneath this complexity, there may be unifying quantitative principles that we are only now starting to unravel. All…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…
Although definitions of technology exist to explain the patterns of technological innovations, there is no general definition that explain the role of technology for humans and other animal species in environment. The goal of this study is…
The contemporary development of hardware components is a prerequisite for increasing the concentration of computing power. System software is developing at a much slower pace. To use available resources efficiently modeling is required.…
Living systems are thermodynamically open but closed in their organization. In other words, even though their material components turn over constantly, a material-independent property persists, which we call organization. Moreover,…
We propose an approach of open-ended evolution via the simulation of swarm dynamics. In nature, swarms possess remarkable properties, which allow many organisms, from swarming bacteria to ants and flocking birds, to form higher-order…
Complex Systems were identified and studied in different fields, such as physics, biology, and economics. These systems exhibit exciting properties such as self-organization, robust order, and emergence. In recent years, software systems…
Resilience is widely recognized as an important design goal though it is one that seems to escape a general and consensual understanding. Often mixed up with other system attributes; traditionally used with different meanings in as many…
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…
System of systems engineering seeks to analyze, design and deploy collections of systems that together can flexibly address an array of complex tasks. In the Complex Adaptive System Composition and Design Environment program, we developed…
While fields like Artificial Life have made huge strides in quantifying the mechanisms that distinguish living systems from non-living ones, particular mechanisms remain difficult to reproduce in silico. Known as open-endedness, we've been…
Experimental science is enabled by the combination of synthesis, imaging, and functional characterization. Synthesis of a new material is typically followed by a set of characterization methods aiming to provide feedback for optimization or…
Nature has engineered complex designs to achieve advanced properties and functionalities through evolution, over millions of years. Many organisms have adapted to their living environment producing extremely efficient materials and…
Antifragility characterizes the benefit of a dynamical system derived from the variability in environmental perturbations. Antifragility carries a precise definition that quantifies a system's output response to input variability. Systems…
Interconnected ensembles of biological entities are perhaps some of the most complex systems that modern science has encountered so far. In particular, scientists have concentrated on understanding how the complexity of the interacting…
All aspects of our society, including the life sciences, need a mechanism for people working within them to represent the concepts they employ to carry out their research. For the information systems being designed and developed to support…
With the completion of human genome mapping, the focus of scientists seeking to explain the biological complexity of living systems is shifting from analyzing the individual components (such as a particular gene or biochemical reaction) to…