Re: Budapest/About CEU Systems Lab

[Jack Corliss]

Two weeks ago Nelson Minar wrote:
>Hey folks, I'm about to head out to Budapest for a month to help out
>at the CEU summer school. Some people there will be using Swarm to
>write complex systems models. I'm just curious if other people on this
>mailing list will be out there.

and more messages subsequently.

Sergio Cavalieri  wrote - responding to Nelson:
>Since I'm going to go to Budapest (for other reasons) and since
>I'minterested in Swarm applications, I'd like to know where and when this
>school is supposed to be
>Thanks
>

Actually, the summer school is in the room I am sitting in. It started two
weeks ago. The room each day has full of course participants (±30), from
Macedonia to Vladivostock, Tallin to Kyrgistan, and places between. We
started doing Stella, a graphical interface for creating coupled systems of
differential equations, with Corey Peck and Maria Moskver from High
performance Systems, to give them a teaching tool and get everyone into the
idea of mapping ideas about systems onto a graphical modeling interface.
The group ranges widely in abilities.

Nelson and Benedikt then started presenting SWARM, Phil Agre
http://communication.ucsd.edu/pagre/rre.html arrived to work with the
participants on creating internet communities - "non-control methods for
technologically facilitated self-organization in social systems", and Peter
Allen http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/public/sims/people/pma.htm  is describing
his experiences in modeling real world systems - like fisheries and river
basins and cities for clients like the UN and the EU. Resource people to
come next week are Giovanni Dosi (Evolutionary Economics), and Chris
Langton (Whatever he feels like talking about).

We are in the basement of the Kerepesi Center, which used to be a workers
hostel back in the socialist days, but is now a dormitory for the students
of Central European University. We are on the eastern outskirts of
Budapest, about 5 km out onto the great plains of Hungary from the Duna
(Danube), the edge of the Roman Empire, the river which drains the north
slope of the Alps, flowing east, then turning south about 50 km north of
here, ultimately emptying into the Black Sea.

The room is about 10x12 meters, and has filled up over the last several
months with IKEA tables and chairs and a set of 10 Pentiums running Linux
(they form a parallel 100Mbit array for PVM) (plus another 10 borrowed for
the course), a dual 200 Mhz Pentium Pro server, all very nice machines by
local clone-makers. Some other goodies are a SGI Origin 200 and an O2, and
2 Mac 4400's for Merrill Oates, who deals with our adminstrative interface,
and I, unrepentent Mac people. The big windows along two sides look out at
ground level to grass and trees - we are in the basement - and they let in
lots of light.

In addition to the class participants and Merrill and I, the other people
in the room are Czabala Peter (systems), Gulyas Laszlo and Kozsik Tamas
(research programmers), all grad students in computer science at ELTE - the
major Hungarian University (think von Neumann, Wigner, Szilard,...), and
Kiss Bori ( research assistant, Web pages) (ELTE English student), and
Lidija Jasnic, (CEU Env Sci and Policy student) (research asst,
bibliographics).

We are devoted to providing user-friendly (Java) interfaces to agent-based
adaptive system modeling engines - that means SWARM, although for speed we
will also use aCe, developed by my guru in massively-parallel processing at
NASA Goddard, John Dorband (http://newton.gsfc.nasa.gov/aCe). Our focus is
on social systems, which are the major interest of the CEU faculty.

CEU was started and is funded by George Soros, who, using his deep
understanding of complex adaptive systems with human agents, diverts a flow
of money from international financial markets into a spectrum of activities
centered on catalyzing the emergence of open societies. His major efforts
have been in the part of the world that was always - in my memory -
colored red on the maps in the newspapers and magazines in the USA -  until
about 7 years ago (Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union).
He also has recently began some activities in the US which provided him
noteriety in the establishment media - like support for the medical
marijuana initiatives, harm reduction for addicts, and supporting work to
keep the Internet open and free. He also recently had the temerity to write
an article in the Atlantic suggesting that unihibited Lassiaz Faire
Capitalism might not be the best alternative to totalitarian Communism and
Fascism. Newsweek and Forbes were outraged.

If you are passing through Budapest, please come and see us (take the Red
Metro to the end at Ors Vezer ter, then the Red 44 or 44A bus one stop).
The class is full but you are welcome to drop by and see us any time. The
beer is great in Budapest (ask Ted Belding), and the reality is different.
This part of the world is in transition,  poised on a multidimensional
saddle in social systems behavior space - it is a time when small endeavors
carefully pursued can grow large.

"There is this much connection certainly between scientific truth, on the
one hand, and beauty and morality, on the other: that if a man entertain
false opinions regarding his own nature, he will be led thereby to courses
of action which will be in some profound sense immoral or ugly."

(Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972, p. 265)

Jack Corliss

Jack Corliss, Director                             36-1-327-3887 tel,
address@hidden
Systems Laboratory                                 36-1-327-3886 tel, -3888 fax

address@hidden, www.syslab.ceu.hu
Central European University                   www.ceu.hu
Kerepesi ut 87
1106 Budapest, Hungary






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