UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM presents "Steering Complex Adaptive Systems: From Biofilms to Industrial Ecology" Dr. Alexandra Penn (University of Surrey) 19 March 2014 (Wednesday) 1 pm -2 pm Hatfield, College Lane Campus Seminar Room ***C402*** Everyone is Welcome to Attend Refreshments will be available Abstract: Many important problems for society involve the management of interlinked complex adaptive systems. Such systems have well known properties which make understanding and controlling them challenging. These include non-linear responses to change in variables, so-called "emergent" effects produced by the action of low-level variables which may feedback to those lower-level variables in turn, the importance of network structure and crucially, the ability to adapt and evolve to changes in their environment. All of these properties present new challenges for policy intervention or engineering as they may give rise to behaviours which run counter to our intuition and experience and may change their responses as we intervene. Additionally many of the complex systems which we would most like to influence have significant social components and may require the integration of participatory or political processes with tools from complexity science. In order to manage complex adaptive systems, we suggest a "steering" approach; an action or series of actions applied to a complex system and/or its environment for achieving a specific purpose. Steering is a continuous process which involves interacting with, monitoring and learning from the system in question. The techniques required for effective steering fall into two categories. Firstly we wish to understand, and indeed exploit, the systems' structure and dynamics in order to intervene effectively with them. Hence we need techniques to uncover this structure and to choose points of intervention. Secondly we frame those techniques within a participatory "adaptive management" structure which explicitly takes into account the adaptive nature of these systems and our limited capacity to fully model real world complex systems, by building in monitoring and feedback processes with which to modify our interventions as systems respond. I will discuss this approach with examples drawn from several different domains. Focussing firstly on the development of a bio-based economy in The Humber region of the UK, I will discuss the various modelling approaches which allow us to uncover system structure and a mathematical "control nodes" technique which allows us to choose a set of points of intervention within a given network. I will then describe how these can be used in a real world participatory context in which policy makers and industrial stakeholders must make decisions. I will then describe a more straightforward system of adaptive management of bacterial biofilms by modifying the environment in an attempt to manipulate evolutionary dynamics. I will conclude with a discussion of the scope of this approach and its challenges and implications. --------------------------------------------------- Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium http://cs-colloq.stca.herts.ac.uk