About the
4th International Nonlinear Science Conference
The principal aim of the INSC is to provide a scholarly environment conducive to promoting exchanges between an array of disciplines to facilitate research and related academic activities in collaboration with colleagues worldwide.
The topics covered by the conference include applications of nonlinear dynamical systems theory and techniques to problems encountered in any area of the behavioral, social and life sciences including psychology, sociology, economics, management sciences, anthropology, aesthetics, education, biology, physiology, ecology, neuroscience and medicine. One or more of the following nonlinear concepts must be an explicit part of the presentation: attractors, bifurcations, chaos, fractals, solitons, catastrophes, self-organizing processes, cellular automata, agent-based models, network analysis, genetic algorithms and related evolutionary processes, econophysics, dynamical diseases, or closely related constructs. The broad mixture of the disciplines represented here indicates that many bodies of knowledge share common principles.
Contributions from other disciplines such as computer science, mathematics and engineering are also welcome provided the main focus of the paper is an application of nonlinear science in the behavioral, social or biological sciences. Submit Abstracts for papers, posters, and symposia to the INSC2010 in the Call for Papers page.
Publication Opportunities:
The abstracts to the INSC conference will be indexed in PsycEXTRA, produced by the American Psychological Association. A post-conference edition of the INSC abstracts will be available in PDF on the SCTPLS web site along with editions of abstracts from earlier conferences.
All speakers at the INSC conference are invited to submit their finished articles for review and possible publication in Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences, which is the refereed quarterly research journal published by the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology & Life Sciences. For manuscript preparation instructions and related information about NDPLS, see www.societyforchaostheory.org/ndpls
Featured Keynote Speaker:
Rosario Nunzio Mantegna
Professor Mantegna
"Empirical investigations of economic and social complex systems"
Rosario Nunzio Mantegna is Applied Physics Professor and Head of the Observatory of Complex Systems at the University of Palermo, Italy. Mantegna is one of the founders of Econophysics, the application of Statistical Physics to the study of Economics. He is the author (together with Gene Stanley) of Introduction to Econophysics: Correlations and Complexity in Finance.
According to their book, statistical physics concepts such as stochastic dynamics, short- and long-range correlations, self- similarity and scaling, correlation-based networks can be used to model the global behavior of economic systems. Mantegna's current research is focused on the analysis and modelling of financial markets; econophysics, social systems, biomedical and biological complex systems.
He is one of the initiators of the Jerusalem Declaration on Data Access, Use and Dissemination for Scientific Research, launched at the 5th European Conference on Complex Systems held in September 2008 in Jerusalem, Israel.
Featured Keynote Speaker:
Professor René Lefever
Professor Lefever
"Deeply gapped vegetation patterns and desertification: A topical Ostwald ripening process"
Natural vegetation covers exhibiting landscape-scale regular spatial patterns have been reported for arid and semi-arid areas world-wide. Recent observations and theories show that such patterns are bound to low-productivity environments, can arise in the absence of environmental anisotropy and can originate by self-organization processes strictly intrinsic to the vegetation dynamics. The conditions of deeply gapped pattern formation and the conditions under which desertification takes place will be investigated more specifically. It will be shown that desertification may occur either as a local desertification process that does not affect pattern morphology in the course of its unfolding or as a gaps coarsening process after the emergence of a transitory, deeply gapped pattern regime. Ecological implications will be discussed. The results amend the commonly held interpretation associating vegetation patterns with a Turing reaction-diffusion type of instability. They provide a more unified understanding of vegetation self-organization within the broad context of matter order-disorder transitions.
Prof. Lefever is member of the Department of Chemical Physics and Theoretical Biology, Faculty of Sciences, Universitéibre de Bruxelles.
Featured Keynote Speaker:
Professor Rolf Pfeifer
Professor Rolf Pfeifer"Self-organization, embodiment, and biologically inspired robotics"
Robotics researchers increasingly agree that ideas from biology and self-organization can strongly benefit the design of autonomous robots. Biological organisms have evolved to perform and survive in a world characterized by rapid changes, high uncertainty, indefinite richness, and limited availability of information. Industrial robots, in contrast, operate in highly controlled environments with no or very little uncertainty. Although many challenges remain, concepts from biologically inspired (bio-inspired) robotics will eventually enable researchers to engineer machines for the real world that possess at least some of the desirable properties of biological organisms, such as adaptivity, robustness, versatility, and agility.
In this talk, I will introduce the concept of embodiment and follow up on its far-reaching implications, in particular how the physical dynamics of an agent's interaction with its environment is coupled with the information processing of the brain (or the brain dynamics). It is also argued that this coupling is fundamental for learning and for the development of cognition in general. All points will be illustrated with many examples from robotics, biology, and psychology.
Prof. Pfeifer is the director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Informatics, University of Zurich. His recent book Josh Bongard, is entitled, How the body shapes the way we think.
Featured Keynote Speaker:
Paul van Geert
Paul van Geert"The human life span as a complex dynamic system"
Human development across the life span is a prime example of a complex dynamic system. Development and aging are processes of change involving the intertwining of a myriad of components, involving the person and its properties and the social and cultural environment in which the person lives. Dynamics range from the short-term processes of human action and interaction to the long-term processes of life-span development and the macro-processes of intergenerational cultural change and biological evolution. These time scales interact in various ways. Part of the difficulty of understanding the life span as a complex dynamic system lies in the paradoxical combination of immediacy (one is the direct witness of one's own life) and the difficulty of scientific accessibility (the scientific study of the human life span is greatly hampered by the difficulty of collecting valid and reliable time-serial data). In this lecture I will present examples of theory building, empirical research and applied aspects of a complex dynamic systems view on human development.
Paul van Geert (1950) holds a doctoral degree from the University of Ghent (Belgium) and is a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands since 1985. He has had a pioneering role in the application of dynamic systems theory to a broad range of developmental areas, including early language development and second language acquisition; cognitive development in the context of learning-teaching processes; and social development including social interaction and identity. His main aim is to better understand the general nature of developmental dynamics, i.e. nature of the mechanism(s) that drive and shape a developmental process in an individual, as the individual, given his or her biological properties and potentialities interacts with his or her actively explored environment.
As an artist, Paul van Geert has had a life-long interest in the representation of people and close personal relationships. His current work consists of life-size representations of people, in the form of free-standing and moveable constructions.
Featured Keynote Speaker:
F. Tito Arecchi
F. Tito Arecchi"Dynamics of Consciousness: Complexity and Creativity"
The cognitive problem is how a given sensorial input elicits a decision. Since neurons undergo deterministic chaos , information is lost in course of time. Control of chaos reduces such a loss rate by adding extra degrees of freedom. This addition is a change of code; such a re-coding occurs on two time scales, namely, (A) the cognitive one (lasting up to 3 sec), within which the brain reaches a collective state associated with a perception, and (B), the linguistic one (beyond 3 sec), whereby memory retrieves different (A) units and compares them. In (A) the neurons are mutually coupled in large networks ; collective synchronization of neuron arrays elicit decisions. In (B), different (A) slots are compared after retrieval from memory. This requires a subject conscious of him/herself as well as of the pieces of the stream to be correlated. While in (A) the neuron synchronization is described in dynamical terms, in B) the slot comparison is formalized by an inverse Bayes rule. Distinction of (A), that we have in common with animals, from (B) where we formulate attributions of truth, recovers the fundamental philosophical difference between apprehension and judgement.
F. Tito Arecchi is Professor Emeritus at University of Firenze. He is the author of seven books and over 400 journal articles on topics that include: Cooperative effects in quantum optics, photon statistics and laser fluctuations, deterministic chaos in optics, pattern formation in extended media,
complex phenomena and cognitive processes. His most recent book is entitled, Cooperation, Complexity and Creativity (publ. S.Di Renzo, Roma, 2007).
Conference Committee:
Prof. Gaetano L. Aiello, University of Palermo, Chair: aiello@difter.unipa.it or tanoaiello@unipa.it
Dick Thompson, Ph.D., SCTPLS President
Prof. Stephen J. Guastello, Marquette University
Dr. Dimitrios Stamovlasis, Aristotle University
Sponsored by:
The Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology & Life Sciences
University of Palermo
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