Invitation to Shape a New Program

Friends---

I wish that I were more free to participate in the discussion here,
but what has taken me away may be of interest to FISers. I have been
tasked by the US NIST (National Institute of Standards and
Technology) to advise on a possible new research program. I have only
two months, but have significant travel funds. This is an invitation
to interested FISers to help shape recommendations and perhaps create
new sponsorship.

Interested parties should contact me directly. Details on what is up follow:

The application domain is business enterprises as complex systems.
The general goal is to use emergent systems/agents to empower
self-organizing aggregations of small and medium sized companies
(perhaps individuals) to perform complex. collaborative work. Vast
benefits to society are expected.

Our work focuses on new paradigms. The Santa Fe approach and the
conventional reaction (call it the Hofstadter/Wolfram view) are not
our focus for uninteresting reasons, rather we are tasked to explore
investing the notion of information with the impetus for (multilevel)
structure. A revisiting of thermodynamics is assumed. This seems to
fit the interest of some FISers.

Programwise, this is where we are: The European Commission is
planning its sixth framework for the "Information Society
Technologies" program, probably at about 4 Billion Euros. The "lead"
element is smart organizations, and the "key" element of that is
self-organizing enterprises. Much work has gone into defining the
problem, with recent workshops of experts in Singapore, Paris,
Washington, Berlin, Valencia and Brussels. Now the job is to define
the "solution space" especially the clever thinking like we see here.

NIST is sponsoring this small exploration with a goal of building a
US program, but an agreement with the EC allows them to be a
"customer" as well. The US program is likely to be heavily based on
biocomputing metaphors and include our National Institutes of Health
(as well as the usual gang: NSF, and ARPA).

If you are interested in contributing or reviewing, please contact me
at <tedg@sirius-beta.com>. Ideas are sought as well as information on
cogent research centers.

Best, Ted
Received on Tue Jul 9 04:25:56 2002