Hey,
To answer the different questions concerning meetings of ECCO and seminars:
For the weekly seminars & presentations:
I'll be there on the 16 and 23 december at 5.30 pm but can not come on 9/12. I someone is able to record Francis intervention for me would be great (I think we should anyway record the seminars in order to come back on it whenever wanted and make it available on our web site with usefull articles of the speakers).
Concerning day's availability, It seems that I will have the same schedule from january till june 2005, so will only be able to have meetings on wednesday and friday from 5.30 thus not thursday as hoped. Can we talk about this ?
For lunch and informal talk:
I am off in Paris untill saterday. So will not be there tomorrow and unfortunatelly not the 15/12. I'll come on the 22/12. Note that I am allways willing to have lunch on another day, you can email me or sms 0473 690 312 to tell me you're going.
For Friday meetings :
I'll be there next friday (17/12).
Can we make a sort of agenda for this meeting ? I would suggest to talk about ECCO mission statement and our action plan to get further with the internet site and our common goal.
For Brainstroming meetings :
I am allways willing to meet on wednesday evenings and WK to have more informal brainstromings on specific ideas. The last one I had with Mixel and Marko in the Walvis was most interesting.
******************************************************************************* Laetitia
From: Francis Heylighen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: "Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
CC: Frank Van Overwalle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [ECCO] Seminars and GOA evaluation
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2004 19:55:42 +0100
ECCO Seminar series
For our seminars, I have reserved a room in the psychology faculty (3C204) on Thursdays, starting from 5 pm, for the rest of the year. This is a large room with an inbuilt projector for computer presentations. Since we will normally be with a relatively small group, we may move the tables and chairs to create a more close setting.
I chose the room in the PE faculty, because the LW faculty, to which I am administratively connected, does not have any rooms available for seminars, and normal lecture rooms have to be paid for if they are not used for teaching. But if anybody knows a pleasant room somewhere else that we could use, I can still change the reservation...
Since all those who reacted noted that Thursday was OK, while no other days were unproblematic for everybody, it seems that Thursday will be our weekly activity day. Moreover, since some ECCO members are normally working off-campus until 5 pm, I suggest to start the seminars a little later, at 5.30, until about 7.30.
The preliminary program for the next few weeks is the following (this will be confirmed in the coming days):
Dec. 9: Francis Heylighen: The origins of organization. A general introduction to the ECCO theme
Dec. 16: Carlos Gershenson: Self-organizing traffic lights: a simple simulation of the mediated emergence of cooperation
Dec. 23: Marko Rodriguez: Towards a computer-support system for societal decision-making
Evaluation of our GOA project
Most of you will know that Frank Van Overwalle and I proposed an ambitious "GOA" project on the emergence and evolution of distributed cognition, which unfortunately was not funded. Today we got the referee reports, which are generally quite positive.
Two referees thought we definitely deserved funding (one enthusiastically so), the third one was a little doubtful. A strong point of the proposal was the quality of the research team, which was basically a combination of the embryonic ECCO as it existed in April, and Frank's Social Cognition group. All referees agreed on the excellent scientific reputation and high activity level of the main promotors, and the broad complementarity of backgrounds and experience of the other members. The only criticism for the ECCO group was that we needed more publications in high-impact journals, which is indeed a weak point. The referees also mostly agreed on the importance, originality and cohesion of the project, but two were more doubtful about the practical feasibility, noting that while we were likely to produce very interesting results, the overall aim of creating an integrated theory of distributed cognition seemed overambitious given the 5 year time-frame of the project. The referees further made some more detailed suggestions for improvement of the proposal.
In conclusion, it definitely seems worth resubmitting an improved version of this proposal next time a call is opened.
--
Francis Heylighen Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group Free University of Brussels http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
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