Dr Bernardo A. Huberman
HP Labs, Palo Alto, USA
"Predicting the Future"
***
Dr Eric Bonabeau
Icosystem Corporation, Boston
"Harnessing Business Complexity through Agent-based Modelling"
Tuesday 25 February 2003
EXYSTENCE* is the European Network of Excellence funded by the Future Emerging Technologies (FET) of the European Commission,
http://www.complexityscience.org|
Membership is open to both academics and business members. The series of Seminars is organised and hosted by the LSE Complexity Group.
Dr Bernardo A. Huberman - Friday 31 January 2003
HP Labs, Palo Alto, USA
"Predicting the Future"
Harvesting social knowledge: A good deal of useful and relevant knowledge lies hidden among members of organizations and it is important to develop mechanisms to identify those who have knowledge relevant to particular problems, to give them incentives to produce reliable answers, and to aggregate those answers to produce useful solutions in a timely fashion. Dr Huberman will describe several novel techniques that have been developed and tested at the HP Labs, Palo Alto, to address these issues. These include a peer to peer system that identifies experts in a large organization, a novel privacy preserving technique for conducting surveys, and a technique for finding whether or not any set of individuals have the same preferences without revealing what they are. Finally in the second part of the talk he will describe in detail a new economics-based technique for predicting the future of uncertain outcomes that uses small groups of people participating in an information market.
Laboratory experiments at HP labs show that this technique vastly outperforms both the imperfect market and the best of the participants. This method is suited for a number of practical applications, such as the evaluation of future technological outcomes, forecasting revenues within organizations, and consensus building in the financial analyst community.
Dr Eric Bonabeau - Tuesday 25 February 2003
Icosystem Corporation, Boston
"Harnessing business complexity through agent-based modelling"
Agent-based modelling (ABM) is the method of choice for modelling complex systems because it captures emergent phenomena. Although ABM is technically simple -anyone with some experience in modelling can build agent-based models, it is conceptually deep. Dr Bonabeau will explain why ABM is the only solution in a number of situations and how to build a successful agent-based model. He will also show with live interactive experiments that ABM drastically changes and challenges the classical notions of explanation and control in a way that sometimes makes business executives feel uneasy. But executives have to recognize that the complexity of the economic and political world is exploding out of their control. Another set of concepts is required to manage in the 21st century, and bottom up modelling is one of the crucial new concepts. ABM has been successfully applied to a number of real world problems. After briefly introducing the basic principles of agent-based simulation, its four areas of application will be discussed using real-world applications as examples: flow simulation, organizational simulation, market simulation and social simulation. For each category, one or several business applications will be described and analysed.
PRESENTERS
Bernardo Huberman is an HP Fellow at Hewlett Packard Laboratories, where he heads the research effort in Information Dynamics. He is also the director of the Systems Research Center at HP labs and a Consulting Professor in the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University. Recently, Dr. Huberman's research has concentrated on the World Wide Web, with particular emphasis the dynamics of its growth and use. He is the author of "The Laws of the Web: patterns in the ecology of information" published by MIT Press. His work helped uncover the nature of electronic markets, as well as the design of novel mechanisms for enhancing privacy and trust in e-commerce and negotiations. He is presently designing mechanisms for harvesting social information within organizations, discovering communities while preserving privacy and for the efficient conduct of negotiations.
Eric Bonabeau is the founder and Chief Scientist of Icosystem Corporation, a Boston-based "idea incubator" that designs novel business opportunities using the tools of complexity science. Prior to his current position, Dr. Bonabeau was the CEO of Eurobios a consultancy applying the science of complex adaptive systems to business issues and the Interval Research Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. He is the author of more than one hundred science articles and three books (Intelligence Collective, Hermès, 1994; Swarm Intelligence in Natural and Artificial Systems, Oxford University Press, 1999; and Self-Organization in Biological Systems, Princeton University Press, 2001). He is also co-editor-in-chief of Advances in Complex Systems and a member of the editorial and scientific committees of more than twenty-five international journals and conferences and sits on the advisory board of a number of Fortune 500 companies
Eve Mitleton-Kelly is the Seminar Series initiator, chairman and organiser; Founder and Director of the Complexity Research Programme at the LSE; 'Exystence' Coordinator of Links with Business, Industry and Government; Executive Co-ordinator of SOL-UK (London) (Society for Organisational Learning); and Advisor to European and USA organisations. The focus of her research has been the strategy process in the business and information systems domains, with over 90 companies in the UK and USA. EMK's recent work has concentrated on the implications of the theories of complexity for organisations and specifically on strategy, IT legacy systems, organisational learning and the emergence of organisational forms. Has published several papers and is editing a volume of selected papers by 14 international authors 'Complex Systems and Evolutionary Perspectives of Organisations: The Application of Complexity Theory to Organisations' Elsevier 2003.