Outline for a Proposal for an Emergence Research Group/Lab/Institute

This is a collaborative document which eventually may become a proposal for funding to support the establishment of a research institute at Bryn Mawr College for the study of complexity and emergent phenomena. Please participate in the creation of this proposal by adding ideas and by suggesting and modifying specific language. All changes are logged by Doug's computer, so don't worry about making irreversible changes.

Remember, everything here is open to discussion and debate: we don't even have a real name for the project yet.

Name

Cast your vote by putting a star after your favorite:

• Emergence at Bryn Mawr
• Bryn Mawr Institute on Complexity and Emergence (BM-ICE)
• Institute for the Study of Emergent Phenomena
• Bryn Mawr Institute for Creative Computation*
• The Sandbox; or The Bak Sandbox; or The Bak Yard
• Bryn Mawr Institute for the Study of Emergent Phenomena (BISEP) **
• Institute for the Study of Emergence in Science and Society
• Stuff that Pops out of Nothing, It Seems
• The Greater Whole
• The Center of the Sum of Its Parts, and More
• Center for Decentering; or The De-Center

Background

• critical mass at BMC
• Emergence is relevant to a dozen (traditionally insular) disciplines
• Emergence can be studied using relatively simple computational approaches

Goals

• To explore, formalize, and model properties of emergent phenomena
• To develop outreach programs that include materials for dissemination
• To serve as a meeting place for those researchers/teachers interested in ideas of complex systems

Research Projects

• Emergent Intelligence Laboratory
• Evolution of Algorithm-Driven Development (in plants)
• Emergence of Multicellularity
• Perceptual Assembly (in plants)

Organization

• A dedicated postdoc as director?

Activities

• Technical, intellectual, monetary support for research projects in emergence
• Seminar series
• A yearly course for undergraduates
• Workshops and lab support for interested Tri-College scholars
• Workshops for area teachers
• Multi-disciplinary major/project area at BMC
• A conference

Areas of Application

• Anthropology
• Archaeology
• Art
• Artificial Intelligence
• Biology
• Chemistry
• Cognitive Science
• Computer Science
• Computational Linguistics
• Economics
• History and Philosophy of Science
• Literature
• Mathematics
• Philosophy
• Physics
• Psychology
• Sociology

Material Requirements

• Computers, and lots of them
• Computer Lab coordinator
• Beowulf cluster (couple dozen PCs linked together for cheap parallel supercomputing)
• Space and office supplies
• A full-time administrative staff member (a postdoc?)
• Technicians: sys admin, web deveopment, application/applet programmer
• Honoraria and travel expenses for visitors
• Money for seed grants to members and BMC or Tri-Co interesteds
• Funding for support for undergraduate, graduate students and postdocs to attend a conference
• Funding to attract well known complex systems people to give keynote address at a conference.

Outcomes and Products

• Series of papers (published in existing journals)
• Workshops, courses, etc.
• Nontraditional projects: algorithmically generated art, e.g.
• Software
• Whitepapers: funding emergent studies in the sciences (with letter to Nature or Science); applying emergence to sciences and humanities; on the proper treatment of emergence

Other Institutes

• The Santa Fe Insitute, www.santafe.edu/
• The Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence, www.isce.edu
• The New England Complex Systems Institute, necsi.org/
• Exystence, www.complexityscience.org/index.php
• Winter School on Complex Systems (in the process of becomming an institute) www.ens-lyon.fr/~nschaban/WSCS/

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