Territorial Intelligence for Multi-level Equity and Sustainability  (TIME) Session 2

Abstract: I will take a critical stance towards the ?Smart? fashion that seems to be sweeping transition thinking these days. As trendy as it is, ?Smart? is very often linked with a techno-fix, eco-modernist vision for the future to which I have trouble subscribing. Our task, no doubt shared by most in the TIMES group, is to arrive at systemic solutions anchored in what was for a long time known as ?appropriate technologies? ? neither high nor low tech, but a smart combination of both, with a foremost objective in mind: to build a world in which humanity as a whole has a permanent ecological footprint of one planet, and to do so under socially and economically equitable circumstances. Given current population trends, this cannot be done within the current high-tech capitalist market system, or with a ?circular economy? still predicated on (green) growth. We need a ?perm-circular? economy that combines re-territorialization, re-localization, and a huge global reduction in material flows together with new, more ?sober" ways of linking territories. I will try to present some useful ideas about how to implement such an economy, drawing inspiration in particular from permaculture, bioregionalism, the ?Municipalist? school of anarchistic democracy, and the ?Territorialist? school of sustainability. Close

Abstract: Human-driven environmental load accumulated over the centuries is causing irreversible shift to ecosystems and pushing humanity's footprint out of planetary boundaries. These dilemmas of coupled social-ecological systems evoke essential challenge of complex systems science, in terms of multi-scale application to the management of real world. Open complex systems that lies in the nature of this challenge requires the openness and diversity in scientific methodologies, in every aspect of theoretical, empirical, methodological, and institutional organizations. Here I review recent activities on establishing a sustainable farming system with multi-scale synergy with environmental and human health, and outline how open complex systems view could integrate divided disciplines and provide interface for management in a transient process. Important propositions for flagship TIMES could be delivered in order to support transversal initiative of young researchers thinking globally. Close

Abstract: The Global Systems Science (GSS) community is trying to develop new ways for complex systems science to support local and global policy in the context of?new methods in data science and modeling and the great need to engage and include citizens in policy processes [1][2][3]. GSS is perfectly aligned with the TIMES Flagship. ?The four main pillars of GSS are: 1. Policy at all levels, from individuals to the world: policy problems at global and national scales.?How can we know which, if any, proposed policy options will work? 2. The new, interdisciplinary approach: how the science of complex social, economic, political, biological, physical and environmental systems can inform policy makers in their work. 3. Data science and computational modeling for policy makers:?the use of??policy informatics? ? the new, policy-oriented methods of modeling complex systems on computers. 4. Citizen engagement:? the behavior of social systems emerges bottom-up, from the interactions of individuals and institutions, in the context of top-down policy constraints - individual citizens must be involved in decision making and policy formulation. In this context of GSS?the talk will briefly discuss how multilevel dynamic?hyper-networks can be used in TIMES [4].?The TIMES Flagship is an exemplar project of Global System Science. Close

Abstract: The paper will present one of the first possible applications of TIMES. One of the main characteristics of complexity is the emergence of properties due to dynamical processes. Our objective is to contribute to the formalization of these emergent properties studying dynamical structures. The structures of complexity proposed here, are interaction systems as the core of self-organization mechanisms. Dynamical networks are efficient tools to express some local or global properties of evolving topology. They capture structural aspects of complex systems representing entities as nodes and interactions between them as links. This contribution presents adaptive algorithms for complex networks dynamics, leading to identify emergent organizations in these networks. One of this algorithms, named AntCo2, is bio-inspired by social insect system behavior and lead to detect emergent structures inside complex networks. Some applications are presented relating to urban morphodynamics analysis of the communication networks of the city. Practical study cases are developed (i) to analyze network vulnerability in case of urban technological risk, using multi-scale measures on dynamical complex systems and (ii) to reconstruct the complexity of logistic corridors as interface between port and metropolitan systems. ?The simulations and results detailed in this presentation, are powered by the GraphStream Library which is a java package for dynamic complex networks (http://graphstream-project.org). Close

Abstract: Open Education is developing at high speed as Massive Open Online Courses. However, education cannot sum up ?to providing online courses. It is necessary to also provide social interaction between students and the tutors in order to create a real educational ecosystem. This is what is sought with POEM, a Personalized Open Education for the Masses ecosystem, that uses complex systems in order to involves students and teachers in lifelong learning. Close

Abstract: We aim to investigate, from a complex systems perspective, ethical issues related to: (i) privacy; (ii) the unauthorized handling, for commercial purposes, of digital traces left by users in smart houses and cities; (iii) the possibility of using ubiquitous information and data correlations to predict and prevent undesirable human social actions related to security and human rights. Problems (i) ? (iii) will be analysed from an inter/transdisciplinary perspective in order to identify, on the one hand, the privacy and ethical concerns during the stage of collection of ubiquitous information in smart environments, and, on the other hand, the possibility of identifying the ideological features of the selected data, which could be used for surveillance and commercial purposes. An evolutionary perspective of Ethics will be presented, according to which moral habits are emergent properties of social affordances embodied in human social interactions. (Social affordances are ?...dispositional collective properties that indicate possibilities of action provided to organisms by other organisms that share co-evolutionary histories ? (Gibson, 1986, McArthur & Baron, 1983)). Close