Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Keynote on Engineered Self-Organization

Just a brief note today, as I squeeze a post between proposal, paper, and parenting: earlier this month, I gave a keynote talk at the Through-Life Engineering Services Conference, a new conference put together by folks in England who are involved in a large mixed academia/industry project to tackle complexity in large-scale engineered systems like aerospace vehicles, the power grid, and trains.

Attending was fascinating for me, getting to see how people who are right in the middle of these manufacturing and management problems are actually thinking about things, and what applied research looks like in the area.  Actually, it helped clarify for me some ways of thinking and talking about my own research, particularly my work on energy demand management. Lots of interesting people too, and hopefully some of the possibly collaborations will come to pass.

The other nice thing about giving a keynote (and writing an invited paper to go along with it), is that it gave a good chance to put together a review on my work in engineered self-organization, and to pull together a unified view for myself of how all the pieces fit together. The talk, "Engineered Self-Organization Approaches to Adaptive Design," is on my webpage now (also in PDF), as is the paper---though unusually, I recommend reading my slides rather than the paper, since they were finished much later, and I think I understood the story my better by the time I wrote them.

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