What are the principles that keep our society together? This question is even more difficult to answer than the long-standing question, what are the forces that keep our world together. However, the social challenges of humanity in the 21st century ranging from the financial crises to the impacts of globalization, require us to make fast progress in our understanding of how society works, and how our future can be managed in a resilient and sustainable way. This book can present only a few very first steps towards this ambitious goal. However, based on simple models of social interactions, one can already gain some surprising insights into the social, “macro-level'' outcomes and dynamics that is implied by individual, “micro-level'' interactions. Depending on the nature of these interactions, they may imply the spontaneous formation of social conventions or the birth of social cooperation, but also their sudden breakdown. This can end in deadly crowd disasters or tragedies of the commons (such as financial crises or environmental destruction). Furthermore, we demonstrate that classical modeling approaches (such as representative agent models) do not provide a sufficient understanding of the self-organization in social systems resulting from individual interactions. The consideration of randomness, spatial or network interdependencies, and nonlinear feedback effects turns out to be crucial to get fundamental insights into how social patterns and dynamics emerge. Given the explanation of sometimes counter-intuitive phenomena resulting from these features and their combination, our evolutionary modeling approach appears to be powerful and insightful. The chapters of this book range from a discussion of the modeling strategy for socio-economic systems over experimental issues up the right way of doing agent-based modeling. We furthermore discuss applications ranging from pedestrian and crowd dynamics over opinion formation, coordination, and cooperation up to conflict, and also address the response to information, issues of systemic risks in society and economics, and new approaches to manage complexity in socio-economic systems. Selected parts of this book had been previously published in peer reviewed journals.

Stigmergy – the phenomenon of indirect communication mediated by modifications of the environment – was first conceptualized by zoologist Pierre-Paul Grasse in his ground-breaking work on termite colonies (Grasse 1959). It wasn’t until 1999 that Grasse’s work was brought to a wider audience by Eric Bonabeau et al (1999) in a special issue of Artificial Life. Since then interest in stigmergic systems has blossomed with researchers recognizing the application of Grasse’s insights to stock markets, economies, traffic patterns, supply logistics, computer networks, resource allocation, urban sprawl, and cultural memes. New forms of stigmergy have been exponentially expanded through the affordances of digital technology: Google’s recommendation algorithm, Amazon’s filtering algorithm, wiki, open source software, weblogs, and a whole range of “social media” are now deemed as essentially stigmergic.

Though the concept of stigmergy has typically been associated with ant- or swarm-like “agents” with minimal cognitive ability or with creatures of a somewhat higher cognitive capacity such as fish (schooling patterns) or birds (flocking patterns) or sheep (herding behavior), stigmergy offers a powerful tool to be deployed in the human domain. The editors of this special issue are thus looking for contributions that have human-human (social, organizational, and socio-technical) stigmergy as the main focus.

Proposals are invited from social scientists, social epistemologists, cognitive scientists, economists, group decision theorists, collective intentionality theorists, computational sociologists, network theorists, multi-agent modelers, and indeed researchers from any discipline that has social complexity and coordination as a core topic.

Papers that are theoretical, experimental, or computational in orientation are welcome. Please send proposals of no more than 300 words to lesliemarsh [at] gmail [dot] com with “Stigmergy/Cognitive Systems Research” in the subject line. The deadline for proposals is Nov 1, 2010.

All papers will be subject to double blind review by a least two referees and accepted papers will be published in a special issue of Cognitive Systems Research

More information about invited speakers, registration and poster submission can be found in the flyer of the workshop or on the dedicated website (not working yet).

Systems biology aims at understanding how biological systems operate at various scales, by studying the interactions between the individual constituents (genes, proteins, cells, organisms). At each of these organisational levels, the degree of complexity is such that information cannot be processed and integrated on a purely intuitive basis. For this reason, mathematical models play an increasingly important role. Such models must be elaborated on the bases of biological data and validated at both the elementary constituent and the global structure scales. Nowadays, the development of statistical analysis and mathematical modeling tools leads to the possibility of 'in silico' simulations of the various processes which underlie the operation of the biological systems at the various scales.

The use of these methods and the new investigation areas that they open are constantly growing. The goal of this workshop is to gather experts of this new interdisciplinary research field in an attempt to draw a sketch of the state-of-the-art and to spread the methodologies to a wide community of researchers.

The workshop will consist of plenary talks of 45 minutes each plus 15 minutes for questions. The schedule will leave time slots for discussions and interactions among the participants. The participation to the workshop is free of charge, but registration in mandatory.

The workshop will be followed by a one-day companion workshop, 'Mathematics of Complex Systems', on Thursday June 10, 2010.

All necessary information to attend the workshop are available at this address: http://sites.google.com/site/mibs3toulouse/workshops.