Feel free to distribute this announcement to anyone who might be interested.
You are hereby invited to the third seminar in
our fourth interdisciplinary series on
<http://ecco.vub.ac.be>Evolution, Complexity and
Cognition (ECCO). (exceptionally on a Monday!)
When?
Next Monday, Nov. 26, 2007, 2-4 pm.
Where?
The seminar room is B 0.036 (building B, level 0,
close to the human sciences computer rooms), on
the VUB Campus Etterbeek. Coffee and drinks are
available. Free entrance: everybody welcome!
Stigmergic university: conceptual and practical issues
Iavor Kostov
(ECCO, Sofia, Bulgaria)
Abstract
The proposed Stigmergic university is envisioned
as a collaborative effort aimed at developing an
open Internet-based system that will eventually
have functionality close to that of present-day
universities. The two main functions of a good
university are teaching and research. In order to
emulate them, the Stigmergic university will
build an ever-expanding and self-organising
knowledge network that will serve both as a
repository for knowledge and as an environment
for the expansion of that knowledge. To build
such a network the system will rely on a
stigmergic question-answer mechanism where
questions will serve as stigmergic stimuli that
will prompt users of the network to write answers
to these questions which in turn will act as
stimuli for asking further questions and thus
leading to an autocatalytic process of knowledge
expansion. Also, a number of advanced algorithms
will be used for the self-organization of the
knowledge network that may facilitate the
emergence of new scientific domains that cross
traditional disciplinary boundaries.
In this seminar, a number of conceptual and
practical issues pertaining to the development of
the Stigmergic university will be discussed.
Among them are the philosophical underpinnings of
the project (the knowledge network as an
environment supporting the construction of
adaptive representations), design issues
(specifics of the question-answer mechanism and
of the algorithms for self-organization),
implementational issues (attracting
collaborators, selecting the computational
environment for the system). Since the problems
are still mostly at a brain-storming stage, the
seminar is intended more as a discussion rather
than a presentation.
Upcoming Seminars
Thu, 29 nov: Yannick Joye: Evolutionary Psychology of Beauty in Architecture
(note that we will exceptionally have two
seminars in this same week, on Monday and on
Thursday!)
Thu, 6 dec: Clément Vidal: Approaches to the
fine-tuning problem in cosmology: an overview.
More information about the ECCO seminars
See http://ecco.vub.ac.be/drupal/?q=node/28 for the full program.
--
Francis Heylighen
Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group
Free University of Brussels
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
"... a wealth of information creates a
poverty of attention" - Herbert A. Simon
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Simon>
