• Is there a way to predict crisis?

    June 5, 2013

    uva-lehman-brothersUvA researcher Dr Rick Quax and his colleagues Prof. Peter Sloot (UvA) and Dr Drona Kandhai (UvA and ING) just published in Scientific Reports a paper entitled “Information dissipation as an early-warning signal for the Lehman Brothers collapse in financial time series” where they introduce information dissipation length (IDL) as a leading indicator of global instability of dynamical systems based on the transmission of Shannon information.

    The authors found that IDL increases towards bankruptcy, then peaks at the time of bankruptcy, and decreases afterwards. Their results suggest that IDL may be used as an early-signal for the critical transitions even in the absence of a predictive model.

    Given that networks are a common phenomenon in nature – from molecular protein networks all the way up to social networks – the results of this study could also help to provide a better understanding of robustness and the cause of sudden changes in a wide range of complex systems, both natural and man-made.

    “Information dissipation as an early-warning signal for the Lehman Brothers collapse in financial time series”
    Rick Quax, Drona Kandhai and Peter M. A. Sloot
    Scientific Reports 3, Article number: 1898 doi:10.1038/srep01898

    Press-release : http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=131622&CultureCode=en
    Paper here: http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130530/srep01898/full/srep01898.html

    Publication by SDU partners

    May 20, 2013

    Topdrim partners Hillary S.W. Han and Christian M. Reidys submitted two papers contributing to the project. In A bijection for tri-cellular maps, the authors give a bijective proof for a relation between uni- bi- tricellular maps and certain topological genus. In A bijection between unicellular and bicellular maps the authors present a combinatorial proof of a relation between the generation function of unicellular and bicellular maps.

    Both paper can be downloaded from the Publications section.

    CS2Bio’13 Programme

    May 11, 2013

    cs2bio2The Topdrim sponsored workshop CS2Bio’13 has just announced the programme for the event. CS2Bio’13 is the 4th international workshop on Interactions between Computer Science and Biology that will take place in the Florence, Italy during the June 6th.

    The meeting will have invited talks by Giuseppe Longo (Randomness, variability and diversity in biological dynamics), and by Mario Rasetti (Towards a quantum model of life: big data, topology, field theory).

    F. Vaccarino talk at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology

    May 3, 2013

    Francesco-VaccarinoTopdrim member Francesco Vaccarino will conduct a seminar on Multi-Persistent homology, complex networks and the brain functional connectome, at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology on May 8th, 2013.

    The First hour is an introduction to persistent homology and its natural extension, multi-persistent homology. The relationships of these objects with geometry and representation theory will be highlighted. In particular we will illustrate some open problems arising in shifting from the persistent to the multipersistent case.

    During the second hour we will show how to extend in a meaningful way persistent homology to weighted graphs. We give some striking applications to complex network classification and to the brain functional connectome, which motivated the approach via weighted graphs.

    Information Processing in Complex Systems (IPCS’13)

    May 3, 2013

    sm-ipcs13Topdrim partners from University of Amsterdam and University of Camerino are organizing a satellite meeting on Information Processing in Complex Systems. This satellite meeting will be part of the European Conference on Complex Systems 2013 to be held in Barcelona, during September 2013. The focus of IPCS’13 will be on information processing as a novel paradigm in understanding and modelling complex systems.

    All systems in nature have one thing in common: they process information. Information is registered in the state of a system and its elements, implicitly and invisibly. As elements interact, information is transferred. Indeed, bits of information about the state of one element will travel – imperfectly – to the state of the other element, forming its new state. This storage and transfer of information, possibly between levels of a multi level system, is imperfect due to randomness or noise. From this viewpoint, a system can be formalized as a collection of bits that is organized according to its rules of dynamics and its topology of interactions. Mapping out exactly how these bits of information percolate through the system could reveal new fundamental insights in how the parts orchestrate to produce the properties of the system. A theory of information processing would be capable of defining a set of universal properties of dynamical multi level complex systems, which describe and compare the dynamics of diverse complex systems ranging from social interaction to brain networks, from financial markets to biomedicine. Each possible combination of rules of dynamics and topology of interactions, with disparate semantics, would reduce to a single language of information processing.

    For more information about this satellite meeting and on how to submit your contribution please visit IPCS’13 website.

    Topdrim meeting at CIRM, Marseille

    April 1, 2013

    20130328-marseille-203

    The Topdrim project held a work meeting at the Centre International de Rencontres Mathématiques (CIRM) in Marseille on March, 28-29.

    The first day started with a presentation by Ricardo Lima on the challenges and opportunities for topology driven approaches to protein-protein interaction research as well as for the analysis of the dynamics of regulatory gene networks.

    During this meeting partners reported on the ongoing research on topology driven methods for describing multi-level complex systems. Also the meeting presented the opportunity for the six partners to explore new opportunities for cross collaborations.

    Slides from the presentations (when available) will be posted in the Publications page.

    Pictures from the Meeting below:

     

    Postdoc Fellow at ISI Foundation

    March 16, 2013

    Postdoc position – TOPDRIM (FET Open Project)
    ISI Foundation Turin, Mathematics of Complexity group

    Starting gross salary is about 28K euro per year.

    Post is available for up to 24 Months.

    A Postdoctoral Research Fellow position is available within the FET Open Project TOPDRIM: “Topology driven methods for complex systems”.

    The goal of this project is to provide methods driven by the topology of data for describing the dynamics of multi-level complex systems. To this end the project will develop new mathematical and computational formalism accounting for topological effects. To pursue these objectives the project brings together scientists from many diverse fields including as topology and geometry, statistical physics and information theory, computer science and biology.

    The proposed methods, obtained through concerted efforts, will cover different aspects of the science of complexity ranging from foundations to simulations through modelling and analysis, and are expected to constitute the building blocks for a new generalised theory of complexity.

    Informal enquiries may be made to Dr Francesco Vaccarino (francesco.vaccarino@isi.it).

    Closing date: 15 April 2013.

    Noise enhances information transfer in hierarchical networks

    February 8, 2013

    peter-sloot-noise-information-transfer-nature-reportsTOPDRIM member Peter Sloot just published a paper on the influence of noise on information transmission in the form of packages shipped between nodes of hierarchical networks. The work, done with colleagues Agnieszka Czaplicka and Janusz A. Holyst, was published in Scientific Reports February, 6th 2013.

    This work shows, that contrary to a naive understanding of the effect of noise on information transmission, generic packet-delivery undertaken by a local navigation rule in a complex network can benefit from the presence of topological noise.

    Prof. Peter Sloot is a full professor of Computational Science and Complex Systems at the University of Amsterdam. He studies ‘natural information processing’ in complex systems by computational modeling and simulation as well as through formal methods.

    CS2Bio’13 – 4th International Workshop on Interactions between Computer Science and Biology

    February 4, 2013

    sc2bio 13TOPDRIM will sponsor the 4th International Workshop on Interaction between Computer Science and Biology (CS2Bio’13). This workshop is organized by the  Università degli Studi di Firenze in Florence, Italy. The meeting will take place on June, 6th 2013 and is affiliated to DisCoTec 2013 – International Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques.

    The workshop will present talks by invited speakers Professor Giuseppe Longo from ENS Paris, and from Professor Mario Rasetti from the ISI Foundation.

    For more details please visit the workshops webpage or our events page.