Research
A short overview of the research at CSE
Driven nonlinear threshold systems are known to be some of the most important and interesting systems in nature.
They include networks of earthquake faults, neural networks, superconductors and semiconductors, and the World Wide Web, as well as political, social, and ecological systems. All of these systems have self-organizing dynamics that are strongly correlated in space and time, and all typically display a multiplicity of spatial and temporal scales. They are usually characterized by observable phenomena that can be understood with modern methods of space-time pattern analysis, and by a highly nonlinear, complex underlying dynamics whose evolution in space in time is extremely difficult to observe, understand, or predict.
Professor John Rundle's group focuses on developing the theoretical and computational methods needed to understand these classes of driven, non-equilibrium threshold systems. They are particularly interested in developing the computational tools necessary to simulate these high-dimensional complex systems within the context of modern, web-based, high performance computing methods using Beowulf clusters and other types of parallel, SMP machines. They view the development of the emergent, Semantic Grid as a particulary promising technology, and they are pursuing the development of emergent computational paradigms. Computational simulations thus represent a major tool and a major focus of our research. Much of their work is concerned with a particularly important threshold system in nature, earthquake fault systems.
W.M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences
Geologists at the University of California, Davis, could soon be making virtual field trips to the depths of the Earth, the interior of earthquake faults and perhaps the rocky plains of Mars as a result of a $1 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles.
The grant is being used to build and equip a room walled with projection screens to create the illusion of an immersive, three-dimensional environment. The facility, which is expected to be operating by mid-2005, has provisionally been named the Keck Center for Active Visualization in Earth Sciences.
Project COLONY Helps Brighten the Forecast for the Prediction Business
The Most Massive, Complex Computer System Ever Built by Sun Will Help Researchers Find Order in Chaos
"One of the leading researchers in the study of cellular automata is Jim Crutchfield, who recently moved from the bastion of complex systems, the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, to start a new research center at the University of California, Davis. Prof. Crutchfield is a true believer, convinced that the links between past and future for virtually any system can be identified and mapped, providing a route to prediction — given the right structural descriptions of emergent structures and sufficient compute horsepower to use them to perform the forecasts.
That's where Sun comes in. Just as the scientific community is expecting big things from Prof. Crutchfield and his colleagues, Prof. Crutchfield is expecting big things from Sun Microsystems Laboratories (Sun Labs). In fact, he's expecting the biggest, most powerful, most complex system Sun Labs has ever produced. It's called COLONY. And it's on its way to Crutchfield's lab in the new Center for Computational Science and Engineering at the University of California, Davis."
The Dynamics of Learning Project
The Dynamics of Learning project is headed by Professor Jim Crutchfield and sponsored by DARPA through its TASK program. Like much of the work associated with complex systems research, the Dynamics of Learning project is agent-based, but not in the usual way. Most agent-based research designs agents for a particular task, or for simulating a particular model; some focus on building general simulation systems for agent-design. While these efforts have been valuable and (mostly) successful, they haven't given us a theory of agents or their collective behavior. This is the gap Crutchfield hopes to fill. The goal is a general, quantitative, predictive theory of cognitive agents and of agent collectives, applying both to natural systems (e.g., the immune system, or insect swarms) and artificial ones (e.g., a group of autonomous robots). The theory would be analytical, predicting what a given system would do, rather than synthetic, saying how to design a system with some desired behaviors, but the analytical methods ought to be useful to designers.
Evolving Cellular Automata (EvCA) Project
The EvCA group was based at the Santa Fe Insitute (SFI) and at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in the Biophysics Group.
The EvCA Project is no longer active, although many other groups now work on evolving cellular automata. A simple web search will take you to these other projects. Nonetheless, this site continues to provide access to the work produced by the EvCA group.
Computational Mechanics Archive
How does nature compute? Or, more precisely, How is information processing embedded in dynamical behavior? The label computational mechanics is simply meant to indicate an extension of the approaches typically found in statistical mechanics. That is, we are concerned with more detailed structural aspects of behavior than those captured solely in terms of probability and degrees of randomness. Beyond focusing on measures of disorder, such as temperature and thermodynamic entropy, we ask the following...