In March, I gave an invited talk at a workshop on Unconventional Computation, in which for the first time I drew together the scattered threads of my research into a single theme: "engineered emergence." I'm not really happy with the name, since the word "emergence" carries a lot of flakiness baggage. For the moment, though, it's the best way I know to describe engineering a bunch of unruly parts so their interactions will produce coherent behavior of the whole.
The slides from the talk are here, and I've reorganized my page to give engineered emergence its own section, pulling in the Assassin's Guild talks which push me towards thinking this way.
