Related papers: Open at the Top; Open at the Bottom; and Continual…

The movement for open-design focuses on the creation of machines, physical systems, and products using design information shared publicly. It consists of the development of systems incorporating open-source hardware and software which can…

Our societies are increasingly dependent on services supplied by computers & their software. New technology only exacerbates this dependence by increasing the number, performance, and degree of autonomy and inter-connectivity of…

We envision future technologies through science fiction, strategic planning, or academic research. Yet, our expectations do not always match with what actually unfolds, much like navigating a story where some events align with expectations…

We formalize the intuitive idea of a labelled discrete surface which evolves in time, subject to two natural constraints: the evolution does not propagate information too fast; and it acts everywhere the same.

Adaptivity is a dynamical feature that is omnipresent in nature, socio-economics, and technology. For example, adaptive couplings appear in various real-world systems like the power grid, social, and neural networks, and they form the…

The concept of intelligent system has emerged in information technology as a type of system derived from successful applications of artificial intelligence. The goal of this paper is to give a general description of an intelligent system,…

This book explores an alternative to the current dominant paradigm where a discrete computer model is constructed as an attempt to approximate some continuum theory. We focus on a class of discrete computer models that are based on simple…

Innovation and obsolescence describe dynamics of ever-churning and adapting social and biological systems, concepts that encompass field-specific formulations. We formalize the connection with a reduced model of the dynamics of the "space…

Opacity is an information flow property characterizing whether a system reveals its secret to a passive observer. Several notions of opacity have been introduced in the literature. We study the notions of language-based opacity,…

Statistical systems are conceived from the standpoint of statistical mechanics, as made of a (generally large) number of identical units and exhibiting a (generally large) number of different configurations (microstates), among which only…

Many networks in natural and human-made systems exhibit scale-free properties and are small worlds. Now we show that people's understanding of complex systems in their cognitive maps also follow a scale-free topology. People focus on a few…

The perception of the value and propriety of modern engineered systems is changing. In addition to their functional and extra-functional properties, nowadays' systems are also evaluated by their sustainability properties. The next…

Since its application to systems, emergence has been explained in terms of levels of observation. This approach has led to confusion, contradiction, incoherence and at times mysticism. When the idea of level is replaced by a framework of…

This paper proposes an alternative to standard first-order logic that seeks greater naturalness, generality, and semantic self-containment. The system removes the first-order restriction, avoids type hierarchies, and dispenses with external…

Open source software is a rapidly evolving center for distributed work, and understanding the characteristics of this work across its different contexts is vital for informing policy, economics, and the design of enabling software. The…

The asynchronous systems are non-deterministic real time, binary valued models of the asynchronous circuits from electronics. Autonomy means that there is no input and regularity means analogies with the (real) dynamical systems. We…

The evolution of an open system is usually associated with the interaction of the system with an environment. A new method to study the open-type system evolution of a qubit (two-level atom) state is established. This evolution is…

In a complex system, the individual components are neither so tightly coupled or correlated that they can all be treated as a single unit, nor so uncorrelated that they can be approximated as independent entities. Instead, patterns of…

Machine learning has achieved remarkable success in many applications. However, existing studies are largely based on the closed-world assumption, which assumes that the environment is stationary, and the model is fixed once deployed. In…

We present several philosophical ideas emerging from the studies of complex systems. We make a brief introduction to the basic concepts of complex systems, for then defining "abstraction levels". These are useful for representing…