• Topdrim review meeting on November 19

    November 25, 2013

    Topdrim Partner

    Toprdim had its first project review meeting in Brussels on November 19th. The meeting counted with the presence of members of all consortium partners and over the entire day a review of all the science produced by the project during the first year was presented.

    The members participating in the review meeting took the opportunity to do a pre-review work meeting on the 18th. This meeting was aimed at organising the presentations of the different partners and to finalise the programme for the review meeting.

    While the morning of the review meeting focused more on the scientific advances and outputs from the project, the afternoon was reserved for the review of the dissemination, financial and management aspects.

    After the presentations made by the participants the reviewers agreed that the project was on a good track. The positive outcome of the first year of the project pleased the project members and show how the collaborative efforts of the different partners are being fruitful.

    Emanuela Merelli visits South Denmark University

    October 24, 2013

    Emanuela Merelli at SDU

    Emanuela Merelli from University of Camerino visited the Topdrim partner SDU at IMADA in the period of 16th-23th Oct., 2013, where she gave a talk on October, 21 on Topology driven modelling – the IS metaphor.

    Abstract:
    In my talk I will introduce a new approach for data-driven modelling based on a model of the immune system (IS), that is a generalization of the IS à la Hopfiel-Parisi model, in which only two-body interaction are present, by many-body interactions (n-ary relations) based on a mean field approach, as is the case of many models in the literature. The novelty is the multilinearity in the configurational variables that allows us to extend the mean field from local to non-local. This peculiarity allows us to show that the partition function Z is similar to that in a topological field theory, as it contains the same global information about the system configurations. One of its functors is the generating function of the Betti numbers of the state manifold of the system. Comparison between the Betti numbers of the model and the real Betti numbers obtained from the topological analysis of phenomenological data of immune systems, is expected to discover hidden n-ary relations among idiotypes and anti-idiotypes: in fact the topological analysis allows to select global features that cannot be reduced neither to a mere subgraph nor to a metric or vector space. The n-ary relations reveal that living matter is not only complex, but relies on the evolution of those constraints, which harness the execution and the emergence of collective functions; principle underlying the S[B] modeling framework proposed in TOPDRIM project (FP7-ICT-2011-8/318121).

    Also, a series of talks on Algebraic Topology are presented to Emanuela Merelli by the group members of SDU. The programme of these talks was:

    • Introduction to Topology space, quotient topology, 3 hours
    • surface, connected sum, gluing and slicing of polygon, 3 hours
    • fundamental groups, 3 hours
    • homology, 3 hours.
    • Delta and singular homology, Euler Characteristics 3 hours.

    Topdrim-Mathemacs joint workshop on Bielefeld

    October 10, 2013

    Dima Volchenkov opens the Mathemacs Topdrim Meeting

    Members of the Topdrim and MatheMACS FET funded projects joined in a workshop on “Mathematics of Complex Systems” in Bielefeld, October 7-9. The workshop was an excellent opportunity for establishing new synergies between members of the two projects and lively discussions occurred during the 3 days of the workshop.

    topdrim-mathemacs-panorama

    The meeting had presentations from both projects researchers and finished everyday with a round table discussion on the important subjects that the two communities shared, both in terms of building bridges between the projects and in terms of applying techniques from partners to each own projects.

    Photos of the event are available in the gallery below and video recording of selected presentations will be available in the future.

    TOPDRIM-MatheMACS Joint Workshop on Mathematics of Complex Systems

    September 30, 2013

    MatheMACS (Mathematics of Multilevel Anticipatory Complex Systems) and TOPDRIM will held the joint workshop “Mathematics of Complex Systems” on October 7-9. This workshop will be held at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research ( Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung) at the University of Bielefeld, Germany

    The three day programme includes talk by members of both projects and is available for download.

     

     

    Samson Abramsky talk at IPCS13 workshop in Barcelona

    September 30, 2013

    Professor Samson Abramsky  from Oxford University was Topdrim’s invited speaker at the Information Processing in Complex Systems Workshop held in Barcelona during ECCS13. The talk was on Contextual Semantics: From Quantum Mechanics to Logic, Databases, Constraints, Complexity, and Natural Language Semantics.

    Samson-Abramsky

    Abstract:
    Quantum Mechanics presents a disturbingly different picture of physical reality to
    the classical world-view. These non-classical features also offer new resources and possibilities for information processing. At the heart of quantum non-classicality are the phenomena of non-locality, contextuality and entanglement. We shall describe recent work in which tools from Computer Science are used to shed new light on these phenomena. This has led to a number of developments, including a novel approach to classifying multipartite entangled states, and a unifying principle for Bell inequalities based on logical consistency conditions. At the same time, there are also striking and unexpected connections with a number of topics in classical computer science, including relational databases, constraint satisfaction, and natural language semantics. This is ongoing work, with a number of collaborators including Adam Brandenburger, Lucien Hardy, Shane Mansfield, Rui Soares Barbosa, Ray Lal, Phokion Kolaitis, Georg Gottlob, Jouko Vaananen and Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh.

    Hypernetworks in Systems of Systems of Systems

    September 19, 2013

    Jeff Johnson presenting at ECCS'13

    Topdrim partner Jeffrey H. Johnson presented his ideas on Hypernetworks in Systems of Systems of Systems in the European Conference on Complex Systems, held in Barcelona. His presentation presented Hypernetworks theory as a formalism to the problem of connecting the micro and macro levels of complex systems.

    Also, in another presentation, Jeffrey Johnson presented his work with Christian Jimenez-Romero and Alistair Willis on the application of Hypernetworks in Scalable Open Education systems.

    Slides for both presentations are available following the above links.