Related papers: Designing complex behaviors using transition-based…

An architectural approach to self-adaptive systems involves runtime change of system configuration (i.e., the system's components, their bindings and operational parameters) and behaviour update (i.e., component orchestration). Thus,…

Adaptive systems react to changes in their environment by changing their behavior. Identifying these needed adaptations is very difficult, but central to requirements elicitation for adaptive systems. As the necessary or potential…

Despite recent developments in management theory, maintaining a manufacturing schedule remains difficult because of production delays and fluctuations in demand and supply of materials. The response of manufacturing systems to such…

In the age of the Cloud and so-called Big Data systems must be increasingly flexible, reconfigurable and adaptable to change in addition to being developed rapidly. As a consequence, designing systems to cater for evolution is becoming…

Behavior Trees are a task switching policy representation that can grant reactiveness and fault tolerance. Moreover, because of their structure and modularity, a variety of methods can be used to generate them automatically. In this short…

This Thesis explores how tools from Statistical Physics and Information Theory can help us describe and understand complex systems. In the first part, we study the interplay between internal interactions, environmental changes, and…

Inherent limitations of contemporary machine learning systems in crucial areas -- importantly in continual learning, information reuse, comprehensibility, and integration with deliberate behavior -- are receiving increasing attention. To…

Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…

The growth of world population, limitation of resources, economic problems and environmental issues force engineers to develop increasingly efficient solutions for logistic systems. Pure optimization for efficiency, however, has often led…

Here we introduce a new design framework for synthetic biology that exploits the advantages of Bayesian model selection. We will argue that the difference between inference and design is that in the former we try to reconstruct the system…

The complexity of condensed matter arises from emergent behaviors that cannot be understood by analyzing individual constituents in isolation. While traditional condensed-matter approaches-developed primarily for ideal crystalline…

There is evidence that the self-assembly of complex molecular systems often proceeds hierarchically, by first building subunits that later assemble in larger entities, in a process that can repeat multiple times. Yet, our understanding of…

We show that a neural network originally designed for language processing can learn the dynamical rules of a stochastic system by observation of a single dynamical trajectory of the system, and can accurately predict its emergent behavior…

Critically elastic materials - those that are rigid with a single state of self-stress - can be generated from parent systems with two states of self-stress by the removal of one of many constraints. We show that the elastic moduli of the…

Continuous adaptation allows survival in an ever-changing world. Adjustments in the synaptic coupling strength between neurons are essential for this capability, setting us apart from simpler, hard-wired organisms. How these changes can be…

Self-assembly in the laboratory can now yield `information-rich' nanostructures in which each component is of a distinct type and has a defined spatial position. Ensuring the thermodynamic stability of such structures requires…

This review explores the innovative design to achieve advanced optical functions in natural materials and intricate optical systems inspired by the unique refractive index profiles found in nature. By understanding the physical principles…

In allosteric proteins, the binding of a ligand modifies function at a distant active site. Such allosteric pathways can be used as target for drug design, generating considerable interest in inferring them from sequence alignment data.…

Multi-step pathways, constituted of a sequence of reconfigurations, are central to a wide variety of natural and man-made systems. Such pathways autonomously execute in self-guided processes such as protein folding and self-assembly, but…

The study of synthetic active matter systems holds the promise for designing smart materials and devices with emergent characteristics akin to those of living organisms, eventually opening the doors to the realization of artificial life.…