| Title | Information Dynamics at the Edge of Chaos |
| Speaker | Dr. Mikhail Prokopenko |
| Chair | Hiroki Sayama |
Abstract
Many evolutionary and self-organization pressures can be characterized information theoretically not only because it’s an approximation useful in designing biologically-inspired Artificial Life systems, but also because numerous optimal structures evolve/self-organize in nature when information transfer within certain channels is maximized. Specifically, distributed computation can be described in terms of three fundamental operations: information storage, transfer, and modification. The talk will focus on information dynamics of computation within spatio-temporal systems, quantifying these operations on a local scale in space and time. The approach will be exemplified in different contexts, including cellular automata, modular robotics, computational neuroscience, and random Boolean networks. In addition, we shall discuss a relation between Fisher information and phase transitions / order parameters, drawing from both thermodynamics and statistical estimation theory.
Biography
Dr. Mikhail Prokopenko is a Principal Research Scientist in CSIRO ICT Centre, Sydney, Australia. He has a strong international reputation in the areas of complex self-organizing systems, with 120 publications and patents, including an edited book (“Advances in Applied Self-organizing Systems”, Springer, 2008). He received a PhD in Computer Science (2002, Australia), and MSc in Applied Mathematics (1988, USSR). Dr. Prokopenko has co-organized and co-chaired the series of International Workshops on Guided Self-organization (GSO); was a keynote speaker at 3rd International Workshop on Computation in Cyber-Physical Systems (Mexico, 2012), NeFF-Workshop on Non-linear and model-free Interdependence Measures in Neuroscience (Germany, 2012), GSO-2010 (USA) and other events. Most recently, Dr. Prokopenko served as an editor of special issues on Complex Networks (Artificial Life), and Guided Self-organization (HFSP, Theory in Biosciences, Advances in Complex Systems), and a section editor for Encyclopaedia of Machine Learning (Evolutionary Computation). He is an Honorary Associate at University of Sydney.
