Plenary Speakers
Hugues Bersini
Université Libre de Bruxelles, Co-Director of the IRIDIA laboratory (Belgium)
Tiziana Catarci
Computer Science and Engineering at Sapienza University of Roma (Italy)
Hugues Bersini
Université Libre de Bruxelles, Co-Director of the IRIDIA laboratory (Belgium)
"Why the whole should be less than the sum of the parts"
Abstract
Biography
In this talk, I’ll describe a succession of complex systems modelling within different scientific disciplines, such as financial and banking networks, immunology, chemistry, climatology, with, in all cases, the pleading for object orientation and the resorting to UML diagrams to facilitate the interfacing between the software developers and the researchers in those disciplines. In a second time, I’ll discuss the concept of emergence, its counter-scientific nature, arguing for a better investigation of the necessary ingredients contributing to a necessary de-subjectivation. For instance, in biology, three of those ingredients could allow a collective phenomenon to be labelled as “emergent.” First, the phenomenon, as usual, requires a group of natural objects entering in a non-linear relationship and potentially entailing the existence of various semantic descriptions depending on the human scale of observation. Second, this phenomenon has to be observed by a mechanical observer instead of a human one, which has the natural capacity for temporal or spatial integration, or both. Finally, for this natural observer to detect and select the collective phenomenon, it needs to do so on account of the adaptive advantage this phenomenon is responsible for.