Critical processes at the ecosystem level influence plant productivity, soil fertility, water quality, atmospheric chemistry, and many other local and global environmental conditions that ultimately affect human welfare. These ecosystem processes are controlled by both the diversity and identity of the plant, animal, and microbial species living within a community. Human modifications to the li...

Models of multi-agent systems with fixed network structure usually update the states of all agents in synchronous fashion. Examples include Cellular Automata, Random Boolean Networks and Artificial Neural Networks. Some recent studies have shown that the behaviour of such models can change dramatically if random asynchronous updating is used. Here we show that many real systems, both natural an...

It is proposed that there are three fundamental adaptive systems that have developed in the course of evolution. One of these, learning, is the only one that is widely recognized. The other two consist of regulation of the energetic aspect of stimulation, and integration of the data of experience into an organized conceptual system. Corresponding to each of the three basic adaptive systems are ...

The close links that now exist between biology and computation raise the prospect of setting species evolution in a broader, computational context. This context would comprise theories about the origins of pattern and order in complex systems. We argue that several processes play crucial roles in both natural and artificial evolution. One mechanism consists of critical changes between different...

We develop a statistical framework for the simultaneous, unsupervised segmentation and discovery of visual object categories from image databases. Examining a large set of manually segmented scenes, we show that object frequencies and segment sizes both follow power law distributions, which are well modeled by the Pitman–Yor (PY) process. This nonparametric prior distribution leads to learning ...

Natural history collections provide an immense record of biodiversity on Earth. These repositories have traditionally been used to address fundamental questions in biogeography, systematics and conservation. However, they also hold the potential for studying evolution directly. While some of the best direct observations of evolution have come from long-term field studies or from experimental st...

We propose a hierarchical generative model that captures the self-similar structure of image regions as well as how this structure is shared across image collections. Our model is based on a novel, variational interpretation of the popular expected patch log-likelihood (EPLL) method as a model for randomly positioned grids of image patches. While previous EPLL methods modeled the density of ima...

Topological surgery is a mathematical technique used for creating new manifolds out of known ones. We observe that it occurs in natural phenomena where a sphere of dimension 0 or 1 is selected, forces are applied and the manifold in which they occur changes type. For example, 1-dimensional surgery happens during chromosomal crossover, DNA recombination and when cosmic magnetic lines reconnect, ...

The Schrödinger problem of deducing the microscopic dynamics from the inputoutput statistics data is known to admit a solution in terms of Markov diffusions.The uniqueness of solution is found linked to the natural boundaries respected by the underlying random motion.By choosing a reference Smoluchowski diffusion,we automatically fix the Feynman-Kac potential and the field of local acceleration...

An essential topic for synthetic biologists is to understand the structure and function of biological processes and involved proteins and plan experiments accordingly. Remarkable progress has been made in recent years towards this goal. However, efforts to collect and present all information on processes and functions are still cumbersome. The database tool GoSynthetic provides a new, simple an...