Statistical physics has proven to be a fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. Recent years have witnessed an attempt by physicists to study collective phenomena emerging from the interactions of individuals as elementary units in social structures. A wide list of topics are reviewed ranging from opinion and cultural and language dynamics to crowd behavior, hierarchy formation, human dynamics, and social spreading. The connections between these problems and other, more traditional, topics of statistical physics are highlighted. Comparison of model results with empirical data from social systems are also emphasized.

Statistical physics of social dynamics

How to ... be a reflective practitioner.

I What Are the Ages of My Three Sons?.- 1 Why Are Some Problems Difficult to Solve?.- II How Important Is a Model?.- 2 Basic Concepts.- III What Are the Prices in 7-11?.- 3 Traditional Methods - Part 1.- IV What Are the Numbers?.- 4 Traditional Methods - Part 2.- V What's the Color of the Bear?.- 5 Escaping Local Optima.- VI How Good Is Your Intuition?.- 6 An Evolutionary Approach.- VII One of These Things Is Not Like the Others.- 7 Designing Evolutionary Algorithms.- VIII What Is the Shortest Way?.- 8 The Traveling Salesman Problem.- IX Who Owns the Zebra?.- 9 Constraint-Handling Techniques.- X Can You Tune to the Problem?.- 10 Tuning the Algorithm to the Problem.- XI Can You Mate in Two Moves?.- 11 Time-Varying Environments and Noise.- XII Day of the Week of January 1st.- 12 Neural Networks.- XIII What Was the Length of the Rope?.- 13 Fuzzy Systems.- XIV Everything Depends on Something Else.- 14 Coevolutionary Systems.- XV Who's Taller?.- 15 Multicriteria Decision-Making.- XVI Do You Like Simple Solutions?.- 16 Hybrid Systems.- 17 Summary.- Appendix A: Probability and Statistics.- A.1 Basic concepts of probability.- A.2 Random variables.- A.2.1 Discrete random variables.- A.2.2 Continuous random variables.- A.3 Descriptive statistics of random variables.- A.4 Limit theorems and inequalities.- A.5 Adding random variables.- A.6 Generating random numbers on a computer.- A.7 Estimation.- A.8 Statistical hypothesis testing.- A.9 Linear regression.- A.10 Summary.- Appendix B: Problems and Projects.- B.1 Trying some practical problems.- B.2 Reporting computational experiments with heuristic methods.- References.

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How to Solve It: Modern Heuristics

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

This paper describes a novel system for creating virtual creatures that move and behave in simulated three-dimensional physical worlds. The morphologies of creatures and the neural systems for controlling their muscle forces are both generated automatically using genetic algorithms. Different fitness evaluation functions are used to direct simulated evolutions towards specific behaviors such as swimming, walking, jumping, and following.A genetic language is presented that uses nodes and connections as its primitive elements to represent directed graphs, which are used to describe both the morphology and the neural circuitry of these creatures. This genetic language defines a hyperspace containing an indefinite number of possible creatures with behaviors, and when it is searched using optimization techniques, a variety of successful and interesting locomotion strategies emerge, some of which would be difficult to invent or built by design.

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Evolving virtual creatures

Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems --Proc. of the First European Conference on Artificial Life, edited by F. Varela and P. Bourgine, The MIT Press, 1992, ISBN 0 262 72019 1, 515 pp.

Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems

This paper is about the development of systems whose end users are professional people working in a specific domain (e.g., medicine, geology, mechanical engineering); they are expert in that domain, but not necessarily expert in nor even conversant with computer science. In several work organizations, end users need to tailor their software systems to better adapt them to their requirements and even to create or modify software artifacts. These are end-user development activities and are the focus of this paper. A model of the interaction between users and systems, which also takes into account their reciprocal coevolution during system usage, is discussed. This model is used to define a methodology aimed at designing software environments that allow end users to become designers of their own tools. The methodology is illustrated by discussing two experimental cases.

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Visual Interactive Systems for End-User Development: A Model-Based Design Methodology

In the Information Society, end-users keep increasing very fast in number, as well as in their demand with respect to the activities they would like to perform with computer environments, without being obliged to become computer specialists. There is a great request to provide end-users with powerful and flexible environments, tailorable to the culture, skills, and needs of a very diverse end-user population. In this chapter, we discuss a framework for End-User Development and present our methodology for designing software environments that support the activities of a particular class of end-users, called domain-expert users, with the objective of making their work with the computer easier. Such environments are called Software Shaping Workshops, in analogy to artisan workshops: they provide users only with the necessary tools that allow them to accomplish their specific activities by properly shaping software artifacts without being lost in virtual space.

End-User Development: the Software Shaping Workshop Approach.

The widespread use of personal software systems and the boom of the so-called Web 2.0 is erasing the distinctions between those who create software products and those who use or consume them. End users are increasingly involved in the design and development of the tools they use. Unfortunately, there is a high incidence of errors in applications developed by end users. In this paper, a view on end-user development is outlined, which identifies the communication gap between end users and professional software developers as one main source of errors. The spectrum of users that lie between pure end users and professional developers is examined. In particular, the focus is on a particular type of end users that are very active in shaping software tools to their needs without being aware that they are programming: in short, they are unwitting programmers. Their characteristics and their need of appropriate development techniques and environments are analyzed. Finally, the meta-design participatory approach we have developed is briefly described to show how it fills the communication gap and well supports the activities of unwitting programmers.

End users as unwitting software developers

Sans avoir la pretention d'expliquer le but et les moyens d'un art arrive deja a une realisation assez avancee, je vais tâacher de repondre, autant que cela est possible, a une des questions les plus souvent posees devant les tableaux modernes. Je transcris cette question dans toute sa simplicite : "Qu'est-ce que cela represente ?" Je me fixe donc comme but cette simple interrogation et je vais m'efforcer dans un expose tres court d'en prouver la parfaite inanite. 
 
--Fernand Leger, Fonctions de la Peinture 
 
The point of view of Leger is agreed on by many modern and contemporary artists and critics; art suggests emotions, interpretations, meanings, mediated by the viewer's experience, mood and mind. After the Impressionists' lesson, the question "What does it represent?" may have different answers according to who asks it. Picasso used to say in Picasso on Art: "People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree." 
 
In the world of computers and technological artifacts, emotions and interpretationsmust not supersede the meaning that the designer of an interface, of amessage, of a dialogue has conceived to make an artifact usable and effective.Hence, the Advanced User Interfaces community opposes to Leger, accepts the challenge and tries to propose visual and perceptual interfaces which abstract from housekeeping and technical details, to be concrete and expressive to their users. In front of a visual interface, humans should not only understand the virtual world behind it, but also be empowered, able to be consumers and producers of knowledge through computing, participant to a human collective mind. 
 
The invited speakers of this edition of AVI, the eighth of the series, explore these perspectives from different points of view. Riccardo Rabagliati, Dean of the Venice Academy of Fine Arts, Italy, explores the realm of interactive art, confronting the complementary skills needed to conceive an artwork through new technologies. Gerhard Fischer, Director of the Center for LifeLong Learning and Design (L3D) of the University of Colorado, USA, explores visualization as a dimension of distributed intelligence, seen as an effective framework for understanding what humans can achieve and how artifacts and tools can be designed and evaluated to empower human beings and empower their tasks. Elizabeth Mynatt, Director of the GVU Center at Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, illustrates the nascent relationship between people and computation, driven by the emergence of people as equally, and interchangeably, consumers and producers of the computing experience. 
 
However, the danger to be an inane designer is always present. How to avoid this trap is collectively addressed by 32 full papers (which are one fourth of the submissions in their category), 45 short papers and 10 system papers, demonstrating prototypes and working experiences. They reflect, out of the about 200 papers submitted, variegated experiences brought to Venice by authors of nineteen countries worldwide. 
 
Three satellite workshops have been associated to AVI 2006. BELIV06--Beyond Time and Errors: Novel Evaluation Methods for Information Visualization has been organized by Enrico Bertini and Giuseppe Santucci, Universita di Roma "La Sapienza", Italy, and by Catherine Plaisant, University of Maryland, USA. Context in Advanced Interfaces has been organized by Kris Mihalic and Manfred Tscheligi, University of Salzburg, Austria, and by Alexander Braendle and Marco Combetto, Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK. The third workshop, Gender and Interaction: Real and Virtual Women in a Male World, has been organized by Antonella De Angeli, University of Manchester, UK, and by Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze, UCL, UK. 
 
Finally, two tutorials, offered by Mark Maybury, The MITRE Corporation, USA, and by Monique Noirhomme-Fraiture, University of Namur, Belgium, survey the Intelligent Visual Interfaces, and the Statistics for Visual Interface Evaluation.

Piero Mussio

Papers

Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems

Visual Interactive Systems for End-User Development: A Model-Based Design Methodology

End-User Development: the Software Shaping Workshop Approach.

End users as unwitting software developers

Proceedings of the Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI2006)