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039;s Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity November 5-6, 2010 2010 Computational Social Science Society Conference September 30 - October 2, 2010 IASC North American Regional Meeting CSDC joins the Consortium for Biosocial Complex Systems Together with the Center for Institutional Diversity and the Mathematical, Computational, and Modeling Sciences Center, the CSDC has been brought into the Consortium for Biosocial Complex Systems under the leadership of Sander van der Leeuw. "Integration is the key to being a leader in solving complex challenges," van der Leeuw says. The new Consortium is also a part of the university-wide Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative headed by Sander van der Leeuw and George Poste.

Sociotechnical system Sociotechnical systems (STS) in organizational development is an approach to complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces. The term also refers to the interaction between society's complex infrastructures and human behaviour. In this sense, society itself, and most of its substructures, are complex sociotechnical systems. The term sociotechnical systems was coined by Eric Trist, Ken Bamforth and Fred Emery, World War II era, based on their work with workers in English coal mines at the Tavistock Institute in London.[1] Sociotechnical systems pertains to theory regarding the social aspects of people and society and technical aspects of organizational structure and processes. Overview[edit] Sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organization. Principles[edit] Responsible autonomy[edit] Adaptability[edit] The second issue is that of complexity. Whole tasks[edit] Job enrichment[edit]

Complex systems Complex systems present problems both in mathematical modelling and philosophical foundations. The study of complex systems represents a new approach to science that investigates how relationships between parts give rise to the collective behaviors of a system and how the system interacts and forms relationships with its environment.[1] Such systems are used to model processes in computer science, biology,[2] economics, physics, chemistry,[3] and many other fields. It is also called complex systems theory, complexity science, study of complex systems, sciences of complexity, non-equilibrium physics, and historical physics. The key problems of complex systems are difficulties with their formal modelling and simulation. For systems that are less usefully represented with equations various other kinds of narratives and methods for identifying, exploring, designing and interacting with complex systems are used. Overview[edit] History[edit] A history of complexity science 1. Americas Europe

Work design Job design (also referred to as work design or task design) is the specification of contents, methods and relationship of jobs in order to satisfy technological and organizational requirements as well as the social and personal requirements of the job holder.[1] Its principles are geared towards how the nature of a person's job affects their attitudes and behavior at work, particularly relating to characteristics such as skill variety and autonomy.[2] The aim of a job design is to improve job satisfaction, to improve through-put, to improve quality and to reduce employee problems (e.g., grievances, absenteeism). Job characteristic theory[edit] The job characteristic theory proposed by Hackman & Oldham (1976)[3] stated that work should be designed to have five core job characteristics, which engender three critical psychological states in individuals—experiencing meaning, feeling responsible for outcomes, and understanding the results of their efforts. Core job dimensions[edit]

Institute for Complex System Simulations (Home page) Complex adaptive system They are complex in that they are dynamic networks of interactions, and their relationships are not aggregations of the individual static entities. They are adaptive in that the individual and collective behavior mutate and self-organize corresponding to the change-initiating micro-event or collection of events.[1][2] Overview[edit] The term complex adaptive systems, or complexity science, is often used to describe the loosely organized academic field that has grown up around the study of such systems. The fields of CAS and artificial life are closely related. The study of CAS focuses on complex, emergent and macroscopic properties of the system.[3][11][12] John H. General properties[edit] What distinguishes a CAS from a pure multi-agent system (MAS) is the focus on top-level properties and features like self-similarity, complexity, emergence and self-organization. Characteristics[edit] Some of the most important characteristics of complex systems are:[14] Robert Axelrod & Michael D.

University of Michigan, Center for the Study of Complex Systems Emergence In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is a process whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties. Emergence is central in theories of integrative levels and of complex systems. For instance, the phenomenon life as studied in biology is commonly perceived as an emergent property of interacting molecules as studied in chemistry, whose phenomena reflect interactions among elementary particles, modeled in particle physics, that at such higher mass—via substantial conglomeration—exhibit motion as modeled in gravitational physics. Neurobiological phenomena are often presumed to suffice as the underlying basis of psychological phenomena, whereby economic phenomena are in turn presumed to principally emerge. In philosophy, emergence typically refers to emergentism. In philosophy[edit] Main article: Emergentism Definitions[edit] Strong and weak emergence[edit]

Self-organization Self-organization occurs in a variety of physical, chemical, biological, robotic, social and cognitive systems. Common examples include crystallization, the emergence of convection patterns in a liquid heated from below, chemical oscillators, swarming in groups of animals, and the way neural networks learn to recognize complex patterns. Overview[edit] The most robust and unambiguous examples[1] of self-organizing systems are from the physics of non-equilibrium processes. Self-organization is also relevant in chemistry, where it has often been taken as being synonymous with self-assembly. The concept of self-organization is central to the description of biological systems, from the subcellular to the ecosystem level. Self-organization usually relies on three basic ingredients:[3] Strong dynamical non-linearity, often though not necessarily involving positive and negative feedbackBalance of exploitation and explorationMultiple interactions Principles of self-organization[edit] Examples[edit]

Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science Assembles for the first time the concepts and tools for analyzing complex systems in a wide range of fields Reflects the real world by integrating complexity with the deterministic equations and concepts that define matter, energy, and the four forces identified in nature Benefits a broad audience: undergraduates, researchers and practitioners in mathematics and many related fields Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science provides an authoritative single source for understanding and applying the concepts of complexity theory together with the tools and measures for analyzing complex systems in all fields of science and engineering. The science and tools of complexity and systems science include theories of self-organization, complex systems, synergetics, dynamical systems, turbulence, catastrophes, instabilities, nonlinearity, stochastic processes, chaos, neural networks, cellular automata, adaptive systems, and genetic algorithms. Content Level » Research Show all authors

Cellular automaton The concept was originally discovered in the 1940s by Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann while they were contemporaries at Los Alamos National Laboratory. While studied by some throughout the 1950s and 1960s, it was not until the 1970s and Conway's Game of Life, a two-dimensional cellular automaton, that interest in the subject expanded beyond academia. In the 1980s, Stephen Wolfram engaged in a systematic study of one-dimensional cellular automata, or what he calls elementary cellular automata; his research assistant Matthew Cook showed that one of these rules is Turing-complete. Wolfram published A New Kind of Science in 2002, claiming that cellular automata have applications in many fields of science. These include computer processors and cryptography. The primary classifications of cellular automata as outlined by Wolfram are numbered one to four. Overview[edit] A torus, a toroidal shape Cellular automata are often simulated on a finite grid rather than an infinite one. History[edit]

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