A personal view of the joint WOSC and IIGSS conference at Pittsburgh

Citation

Andrew, A.M. (2002), "A personal view of the joint WOSC and IIGSS conference at Pittsburgh", Kybernetes, Vol. 31 No. 7/8. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2002.06731gab.004

A personal view of the joint WOSC and IIGSS conference at Pittsburgh

Keywords: Cybernetics, Systems, Reconstructability analysis, Grey Systems, Bios, Balascopy, Relonics

AbstractAn account is given, from the viewpoint of an individual participant, of the joint event comprising the Twelfth Congress of the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics and the Fourth Workshop of the International Institute of General Systems Studies.

The Twelfth Congress of the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics, and the Fourth Workshop of the International Institute of General Systems Studies were held as a joint event in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during March 24-26. The venue was the opulent Sheraton Hotel in Station Square, with a magnificent view across the Monongahela River of the interestingly varied high buildings of downtown Pittsburgh, and the paddle steamer Liberty Belle moored in front.

Since, the event lasted only three days the programme was rather intensive with parallel sessions, and with an 8.30 start on each day, and on the first two days programmed activity continued after dinner until 9.30 P.M. It is impossible for one participant to report on the entire conference, though towards the end the pressure was eased by the fact that a number of speakers were unable to attend because of visa or travel difficulties.

The main topics of discussion corresponded to the five plenary addresses, confirming that the topics of these were well chosen. The opening address on the first day was by Robert Vallée on "Cybernetics and Systems, from Past to Future" and was relatively uncontroversial though a graduate of Harvard Medical School mildly admonished the speaker for failing to mention the influence on Norbert Wiener of Walter B. Cannon.

The plenary address on the afternoon of the first day was a review of Reconstructability Analysis, by Martin Zwick of Portland State University (Portland, Oregon). The technique allows the derivation of appropriate models from data, where a great many sources of data may or may not be mutually correlated. Several of the examples referred to involved medical data. The origins of the method are associated with George Klir and have been treated in his journal of General Systems, including an issue devoted to Chinese contributions to the topic by Shu (2000) and others. A session in the present conference was chaired by Guangfu Shu.

In a paper by Gary P. Shaffer of Southeastern Louisiana University, similar principles were applied to an important ecological problem, namely the restoring of the ecological "health" of degraded swamp areas near the lower Mississippi. The special interpretation he brought to bear was justified by practical results. Principles of Reconstructability Analysis were also related to quantum computing by Anas Al-Rabadi and Martin Zwick.

The plenary address on the morning of the second day was called "The Bridge to Humanity's Future" by Willard C. Fey and Ann C.W. Lam who have formed an organisation called Ecocosm Dynamics Ltd. A well-prepared video was shown, illustrating the rate at which human activities are depleting world resources, with consumption quadrupling every 35 years. The outlook is gloomy, since such depletion cannot continue indefinitely and yet attempts to reduce it produce major social and military crises. The video clearly depicted human folly through the ages including clips from film re-enactments of famous battles.

There was no pretence that a simple solution to the dilemma could be found and the essential message was just that we should all be thinking about it. A similar message was conveyed at the Eleventh WOSC Congress by Y. Gorsky (Gorsky et al 1999; Gorsky 2000), who unfortunately was not able to be at the Pittsburgh meeting although included in the programme.

The plenary address on the afternoon of the second day was called "Logos, Chaos, Bios and Telos: Mathematical developments as models for creative processes" by Hector Sabelli of the Center for Creative Development, associated with Rush University, Chicago. The first part of the title was acknowledged to be rather fanciful, but the paper was a useful review of methods of generating sequences of numbers with properties that are of interest in connection with biological phenomena, under the heading of Bios. The sequences are generated by a simple formula incorporating the trignometric sine function of the previously generated number, and incorporating a "gain" value. The properties of the generated sequences change as the gain is increased.

For sufficiently high gain, the properties of the sequences appear to be additional to those describable as periodic, random or chaotic, and seem to be such as to actively shun periodicity, so that periodicity is actually increased by random reshuffling. The term "Bios" has been used to refer to the new behaviour. In the plenary lecture the successive stages of number generation (periodic, random, chaotic, Bios) were linked, at a lower level, to basic principles of mathematics as specified by the Bourbaki group, and at a higher level to various aspects of human behaviour, with Bios corresponding to creativity. This is an imaginative and poetic viewpoint, and it cannot be said that any practical significance of the findings is yet apparent, but it is easy to feel that something major is emerging.

On the morning of the third and final day the plenary paper was called "Relonics: Balascopy-Based Systems-Specific Technology" and was by Vadim I. Kvitash, who formerly worked in Odessa and is now of the Medical School of the University of California at San Francisco. His approach, referred to as Balascopy or Relonics, stems from the observation that conventional medical practice depends largely on a static view of the living organism, in which pathology is assumed to be indicated by variables going outside accepted limits of normality. He demonstrated by reference to specific cases that a subject can be very ill with all of these indicators within normal ranges. The new approach introduces a systems view in which relations between deviations of the respective measured variables are studied. Important new insights and much improved diagnostic accuracy are obtained without the need for extra tests. Particular reference was made to diagnosis and prognosis of heart disease.

In introducing the new approach, it was argued that regulation and coordination in the living system should be seen as operating independently. The methods described allow the detection of relations between variables, and hence evidence of coordination. Contrary to what might be intuitively assumed, a high degree of coordination is symptomatic of a system that is in trouble, and perhaps to be seen as fighting for survival. The last-ditch defensive mechanisms of the body operate so as to increase the linking between subsystems.

The distinction between regulation and coordination was emphasised by Kvitash and at first sight may seem to be counterintuitive. A similar distinction is made by Napalkov et al (1995, 1996) in discussing various levels of control of heart activity and may be an aspect of biological control that has received attention mainly in Russia.

There were other interesting discussions besides those under headings of plenary addresses. A session on Nonlinear Research and Prediction was chaired by Lyudmila K. Kuzmila from Kazan State Technical University, Russia, which is named in honour of A.N. Tupolev, the aircraft designer. Within the session she gave a paper on Asymptotic Models and Methods in Complex Systems Dynamics. The paper was impressive but of a complexity that really requires perusal of a printed version. She also represented the International Federation of Nonlinear Analysts and an international journal called Problems of Nonlinear Analysis in Engineering Systems. This is published in Kazan and is intended to cover all areas of fundamental and applied sciences including natural and humanities disciplines as well as physics and engineering. It seems likely to be a valuable forum and details can be found on the website http://www.kcn.ru/tat_en/science/ans/journals/ ansj.html

Social issues and particularly education received attention, and there were three papers from Colombia, all aimed at improving education and social conditions there, and all presented by the same speaker because the other authors were unable to attend. They involved fairly complex models of the relations between educators and other bodies such as government departments, and while the good intentions and validity (up to a point) of the work were applauded, it was pointed out in discussion that everything can be overturned by a drastic occurrence such as the revolution that put an end to Stafford Beer's work in Chile.

A number of participants were from the People's Republic of China, and apart from their contributions to Reconstructability Analysis, particular interest was aroused by their work on Grey Systems, where a grey number is even more imprecise than a fuzzy value. A specific example of such greyness is given in a paper on Grey Transportation Problems by Bai Guozhong of Foshan University in P.R. China. In this the analysis of transportation under emergency or wartime conditions is treated, where the time and cost of transportation over a route may be drastically changed if roads and infrastructure have been damaged. Under these conditions the time and cost become grey numbers.

A number of papers proposed new theories of space and time, some of them apparently taking quite serious issue with Einstein's theories.

The symposium on Robotics that was proposed by John Rose received little response and was finally reduced to one session on Robotics and Systems Engineering. The first paper in this was by Gianmarco Radice, of the Department of Aerospace Engineering of Glasgow University, on development of an autonomous spacecraft for planetary exploration. The spacecraft was assumed to be in orbit and to require different orientations according to whether it was collecting data through a camera lens, transmitting accumulated data to a ground station, or recharging its batteries using solar energy. For a micro-spacecraft, unlike a larger satellite, each of these functions requires a different orientation of the entire craft. The necessary state changes are determined optimally so that mission goals are achieved without placing the craft in an irrecoverable position, such as running out of power while in the planet's shadow. Autonomous implementation of the policy gives the craft a lifelike self-sustaining character. The changes of orientation were planned subject to the constraint that the camera should never point at the sun, and attention was given to collaborative operation of multiple craft.

Also in the session was a description of advanced methods for remote access to computer programs, where the application interface can operate autonomously to present a quite different appearance to different users according to requirements. This is at the forefront of modern ideas on network computing and was in a paper by Michele Courant and Stephanie Le Peutrec of the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.

Two other papers allocated to this session were by authors from Bulgaria who were among those unable to attend. One of the papers, by S. Popova of the Institute of Control and System Research of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, described the use of a neural net for parameter estimation in control of a yeast cultivation process. The other paper, by S. Popova and T. Patarinska, also described the use of parameter estimation for adaptive control of a micro-biological production process, this time by application of Kalman filtering.

The selection of a paper whose authors would receive the Kybernetes Research Award was no easy task. The final choice was "A Learning Model for the Dual Evolution of Human Social Behaviours" by M. Nemiche and Rafael Pla-Lopez of the Universitat de València, Spain. This paper has a strong bearing on current problems, and the desirable feature of a concrete model rather than vague speculation.

Three other papers were chosen to be Highly Commended. In alphabetical order of the surname of first author these are as follows.

• •

  "The Bridge to Humanity's Future" by Willard R. Fey and Ann C.W. Lam, already mentioned as one of the plenary addresses.

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  "The Technical Change and the Funds for Science and Technology" by Sifeng Liu, Yi Lin, Yaoguo Dang and Bingjun Li, where the first author is from Nanjing University, P.R. China, the second from Slippery Rock University, Pennsylvania, and the last two are from Henan Agricultural University, P.R. China. This paper introduces a new type of model, embodying grey system theory, and here again having important application areas.

"Simulating Ecosystem Dynamics by Isolating Events comprised of only a Few Variables: Needs for a K-Systems Granulation Methodology" by Gary P. Shaffer. This paper has already been mentioned as applying principles of Reconstructability Analysis in an important ecological task, namely the ecological regeneration of marsh areas adjacent to the lower Mississippi.

An account by one participant of an event such as this is necessarily incomplete and must certainly be read in conjunction with others. Enough has been said to show that the meeting was an undoubted success, on which the organisers are to be congratulated, particularly the main local organiser, Professor Yi Lin.

Dr Alex M. Andrew