All posts by open-gss

Narratives, models and scholarly communication

The focus of our discussion in the Global Systems Science “narratives” workshop has been on the narrative as a lens onto a model, for consumption by decision-maker and citizen. I’d like to make a connection with a related discussion in scholarly communication – where the narrative is instead for the scholar, but some of the issues are pertinent, particularly to do with the narrative as a social object and digital object.

There is much discussion in the scholarly communications (and future of research communication) community just now about “Beyond the PDF”. One approach is to ask how the academic paper (a mechanism about 350 years old) evolves with modern digital practice. Another – and this is my provocation – is to ask what will be the shared digital artefact that scholars will be exchanging in the future?

There is already evidence of new practice and new objects – for example, aggregations of data and procedural knowledge which may be executable. These research objects are compound digital objects but also social objects around which discourse occurs and social networks form, and they are produced and consumed by humans and machines: they typically contain narratives.

What does this mean for us?  I suggest four points:

  1. We should consider if narratives are also to be consumed and produced by machine, and if this is achieved through text processing or bundling with machine-processable forms.  Even if not machine-generated, the lifecycle of narratives might surely be machine-assisted;
  2. The social life of narratives is an interesting thing to instrument and analyse; e.g. their provenance, usage, evolution. If nothing else this helps us use narratives more effectively, but also it enables analysis of collaboration in the complex sociotechnical ecosystem that is Global Systems Science;
  3. As we think of narratives throughout their lifecycle we can think also of their inter-relationships and associations with the other digital artefacts of Global Systems Science, such as the models, the experiments, the dataflows, …;
  4. Research Objects themselves may be of interest, as they are a mechanism for sharing methods, for reproducible science, for automation to handle scale and assistive systems to enable human creativity – all things we need for Global Systems Science.

A closing thought re (3). One criticism of papers is that they enforce exchange of “human sized chunks of knowledge” and are only targetted  at specific audiences, so might actually act to constrain our science.  A model that is bundled with multiple narratives might serve better, behaving as a boundary object which can be exchanged between communities – with a common core and multiple interpretations for different users.

I shall mention some of this in my talk Knowledge Infrastructure for Global Systems Science in the Information Society, Models and Narratives session on Saturday morning.  For more on the Future of Research Communication check out FORCE11, and there is an emerging literature on research objects.

— Dave

david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.uk

Professor David De Roure
Director, Oxford e-Research Centre

UK National Strategic Director for Digital Social Research
University of Oxford 

Global Markets – Model and Policies – Reference

Here is a reference on how network theory can be employed to assess the fragility of financial markets:

 

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304393211000481

 

Abstract:

This paper develops a network model of interbank lending in which unsecured claims, repo activity and shocks to the haircuts applied to collateral assume centre stage. We show how systemic liquidity crises of the kind associated with the interbank market collapse of 2007–2008 can arise within such a framework, with funding contagion spreading widely through the web of interlinkages. Our model illustrates how greater complexity and concentration in the financial network may amplify this fragility. The analysis suggests how a range of policy measures – including tougher liquidity regulation, macro-prudential policy, and surcharges for systemically important financial institutions – could make the financial system more resilient.

Global Systems Science – Workshop I

The group included scientists and (at least) two people with experience of applying scientific methods in a policy context, one from a company with 300,000 employees worldwide.

The context for the discussion was the paper on GSS by Ralph Dum (available on this site).

There was consensus that Global System Science is policy oriented.

The term ‘global’ is interpreted as meaning the whole system and can apply at different levels including the city level, national level and international level worldwide. Global system have entangled subsystems that cannot be analysed in isolation, e.g. water, waste, power, transport, housing, crime, employment, climate, etc. Geography and history (path dependence) are usually important. Global systems have many levels.

There was (implicit) consesus that GSS involves systems of systems and networks of networks.

Some systems have to be modelled bottom-up from individual agents.

Although we believe GSS must involve policy, scientists are not good at interfacing to policy makers. The example was given of working with the mayor of a large city. These are smart people who handle complexity all the time. The example included talking to the mayor to understand how they see their problems, and pointing out that the issues are coupled and may be best handled from a systems perspective.

Global systems science can be defined around POLICY INFORMATICS, i.e. building ICT systems to address particular policy issues. The example was given of the $180 million tem year research programme at Los Alamos that started with the US Federal Clean Air Act which could not be implemented because no-one understood how road traffic caused polutants (it can be noted that this generated new science).

There was a discussion of computability.

There was (implicit) consensus that GSS involves Big Data.

Global System Science can be viewed in terms of coordination failure. This can include faliyre cascades. This was considered to be a fruitful direction.

Much more was discussed. The following points were made in conclusion:

* we need to make a bridge between scientists and policy makers
scientists need to usnderstand the language and methods of policy makers
scientists need to be better communicators (some are better at this than others)

* it is useful to consider coordination faliures and cascades of failure
we need a list of exemplar Global Systems
this can help to make the bridge

* we are close to having useful modelling of heterogeneous agents on (changing) (multilevel) networks (of networks)

+ there is the issue of computatiblity (related to topology, local v global) and new ideas in computation.

sorry for leaving a lot out, more to come …

In the meantime we all read Ralph Dum’s paper for the next session.

Information Society Workshops

Chairs: Prof. Patrik Jansson and Ulf Dahlsten

The overall aim of the three workshops (Thu, Fri, Sat) is to identify “ICT Challenges to Global Systems Science”. In each case there are three  workshops in parallel (the ICT workshop + two others) so out of the 55-65 conference participants present perhaps 15-25 will be at “our” workshop. We have 1.5-2 hours scheduled for each workshop, and we should use around half that time for presentations and half for discussions.

This means that each speaker has 15 minutes for the prepared interventions and 15-20 minutes for discussion. In your presentations, please try to highlight opportunities, challenges and open questions and end with a slide (or a hand-out) summarizing these as a basis for the discussion.

Thursday, 8th November 2012, 17.00 – 16.30:

 

Information Society (1):  The  ICT challenges  to  Global  Systems  Science  – Chair:

Ulf  Dahlsten, former Director at the European Commission, Global Climate Forum

 

Main topics and questions:

 

What are the main ICT  challenges for GSS research and evidence-building?

How to enlarge the research community and involve more ICT experts?

How should the challenges be tackled?

 

Please provide insights on key questions for future Research and Development directions relevant for: 1) ICT and 2) policy areas.

 

Speakers:

 

Per Öster: E-science and European Grid Computing.

Vittorio Loreto: ICT and Global online communities.

Chris Barrett: Verification and validation of simulation models: the roles of theory, experimentation and observation.

Other participants: Martin Elsman, Patrik Jansson, Wolfgang Boch

 

 

 

 

Friday, 9th November 2012, 10.30 -12.30:

Information Society (2) – Computer Science meets Global Systems Science – Chair: Prof. P. Jansson, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden

 

Topics and questions:

 

 

What is the role of computer science in Global Systems Science?

What specification-, modelling- and implementation-languages are useful for GSS?

What visualisation and user interfaces are needed?

What is the role of open and transparent data, new ontologies and structured data?

What is the role of scientific code? (e.g. common languages, specifications and open implementations).

How can we make models and results easily accessible and deployable?

How can we make models and results of modelling – including their strengths and limitations – understandable and accessible to diverse stakeholders?

 

Please provide insights on key questions for future Research and Development directions relevant for: 1) ICT and 2) policy areas.

 

 

Contributors / participants:

 

Patrik Jansson: Introduction

Martin Elsman: Scientific code: common languages, specifications and open implementations

Zhengang Han: Modelling and visualization

Johan Jeuring: E-learning and mathematics

Other participants: John Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Katharyna Szkuta,
Sat, Nov 10, 09.00 – 10.30:

ICT, Models and Narratives – Co-chairs:Patrik Jansson & Ilan Chabay

 

Topics and questions:

 

Verification and validation of simulation models: the roles of theory, experimentation and observation

Models and Narratives: bringing stakeholders into the process of GSS and GSS into societal processes via ICT
Speakers:

Jeremy Gibbons: “Dependent types for dependable modelling”

Michael Resch: “Verification and validation of simulation models:  the roles of theory, experimentation and observation”

David De Roure: “Software sustainability” or “myExperiment – sharing workflows

 

Some points to consider for GSS

To get the ball rolling…

• Systems approach to provide a framework for studying policy options, testing scenarios and decision making
• What needs to be considered and at what scale?
• Modelling techniques for analysis, predictions and forecasts.
• Incorporation of data – especially new data provided by user participation, data mining or ubiquitous computing
• Methods to offer new explanations, allow consultation and obtain feedback.
• Greater transparency and  relevance in periods of instability and uncertainty.