late hello

[massimo warglien]

Following a well grounded national habit, and with complicity of some
travelling and  Christmas holidays, we arrive late with our hello.

We are the gondola group of Swarm testers, from the university of Venezia,
Italy (this adds some mediterranean flavor to the geography of swarm).

We are from a management department, and we have entered the swarm beta
business in order to model some processes of intra-firm evolution. More
specifically, we are dealing with the dynamics of populations of R&D
projects (we have a large data set in the domain of microelectronics we are
exploting to inspire the architecture of our simulations). The aim of the
project is to explore organization-level adaptation patterns as emergent
properties of project-level behavior. Furthermore, we want to model the
industry-level evolution as the outcome of nested, multiple-level dynamics
including populations of organizations at the higher level and population
of projects at the lower level of the spatio-temporal bandwith.

A second project on which we are working is modeling the emergence of
technological standards and the process of speciation in the evolution of
standards (why do standards sometimes diverge rather than converge?). This
second project has some connections to Axelrod's "culture" model you have
found in the early demos.

After spending some time on compilation issues, we are finally able to
start our modelling work. Hope to send soon good news from the lagoon.

Ciao to everybody,

Alessandro Perrone and Massimo Warglien
Dept. of  Management and Business Economics
University of Venezia,

Dorsoduro 1075, Venezia, Italy