Related papers: Towards a Theoretical Foundation of Process Scienc…
We lay the groundwork for a formal framework that studies scientific theories and can serve as a unified foundation for the different theories within physics. We define a scientific theory as a set of verifiable statements, assertions that…
Many domains of science have developed complex simulations to describe phenomena of interest. While these simulations provide high-fidelity models, they are poorly suited for inference and lead to challenging inverse problems. We review the…
With the rise of foundation models, there is growing concern about their potential social impacts. Social science has a long history of studying the social impacts of transformative technologies in terms of pre-existing systems of power and…
Causal inference is a central goal across many scientific disciplines. Over the past several decades, three major frameworks have emerged to formalize causal questions and guide their analysis: the potential outcomes framework, structural…
While "complexity science" has achieved significant successes in several interdisciplinary fields such as economics and biology, it is only a very recent observation that legal systems -- from the way legal texts are drafted and connected…
Modeling environmental ecosystems is essential for effective resource management, sustainable development, and understanding complex ecological processes. However, traditional methods frequently struggle with the inherent complexity,…
What is a systems approach? The first step towards answering this question is an understanding of the history of the systems movement, which includes a survey of contemporary systems discourse. In particular, I examine how systems…
In the quest to align deep learning with the sciences to address calls for rigor, safety, and interpretability in machine learning systems, this contribution identifies key missing pieces: the stages of hypothesis formulation and testing,…
Causal inference is a science with multi-disciplinary evolution and applications. On the one hand, it measures effects of treatments in observational data based on experimental designs and rigorous statistical inference to draw causal…
Software engineering concepts and processes are worthy of formal study; and yet we seldom formalize them. This "research ideas" article explores what a theory of software engineering could and should look like. Software engineering research…
Progress in science is deeply bound to the effective use of high-performance computing infrastructures and to the efficient extraction of knowledge from vast amounts of data. Such data comes from different sources that follow a cycle…
The profile of research software engineering has been greatly enhanced by developments at institutions around the world to form groups and communities that can support effective, sustainable development of research software. We observe,…
Process automation is a crucial strategy for improving business processes, but little attention has been paid to the effects that automation has once it is operational. This paper addresses this research problem by reviewing the literature…
System safety refers to a diverse engineering discipline assessing and improving various aspects of safety in socio-technical systems and their software-intensive sub-systems. While system safety has been a vital area of applied research…
Many scientific fields, from medicine to seismology, rely on analyzing sequences of events over time to understand complex systems. Traditionally, machine learning models must be built and trained from scratch for each new dataset, which is…
Cities are systems with a large number of constituents and agents interacting with each other and can be considered as emblematic of complex systems. Modeling these systems is a real challenge and triggered the interest of many disciplines…
There is a lack of formalism for some key foundational concepts in systems engineering. One of the most recently acknowledged deficits is the inadequacy of systems engineering practices for engineering intelligent systems. In our previous…
In an ever-changing world, even software that fulfils its requirements may have un-envisioned aftereffects with significant impacts. We explored how such impacts can be better understood at the pre-design phase in support of organisational…
Concepts in a certain domain of science are linked via intrinsic connections reflecting the structure of knowledge. To get a qualitative insight and a quantitative description of this structure, we perform empirical analysis and modeling of…
Finding general principles underlying brain function has been appealing to scientists. Indeed, in some branches of science like physics and chemistry (and to some degree biology) a general theory often can capture the essence of a wide…