

The Ninth International Conference on Guided Self-Organisation (GSO-2018) : Information Geometry and Statistical Physics
March 26 - 28, 2018
Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences
The goal of Guided Self-Organization (GSO) is to leverage the strengths of self-organization (i.e., its simplicity, parallelization, adaptability, robustness, scalability) while still being able to direct the outcome of the self-organizing process. GSO typically has the following features:
(i) An increase in organization (i.e., structure and/or functionality) over time;
(ii) Local interactions that are not explicitly guided by any external agent;
(iii) Task-independent objectives that are combined with task-dependent constraints.
GSO-2018 is the 9th conference in a bi-annual series on GSO. Recent research is starting to indicate that information geometry, nonequilibrium statistical physics in general, and the thermodynamics of computation in particular, all play a key role in GSO. Accordingly, a particular focus of this conference will be the interplay of those three topics as revealed by their relationship with GSO.
The following specific topics are of special interest:
- information-driven self-organisation
- complex systems and networks
- non-equilibrium statistical physics
- non-extensive statistical mechanics
- physics of information and computation
- information dynamics
- generalised entropies
- generalised relative entropies
- alpha geometry and alpha statistics
- constraints and maximum entropy principle
- information-geometric aspects of Fokker-Planck and Kolmogorov equations
Financial support
The conference is financially supported by the DFG Priority Program Autonomous Learning.

Date and Location
March 26 - 28, 2018
Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences
Inselstraße 22
04103 Leipzig
Germany
see travel instructions
Organizing Committee
Nihat Ay
MPI for Mathematics in the Sciences
Leipzig (Germany)
Mikhail Prokopenko
University of Sydney (Australia)
Program Committee
- Nihat Ay, MPI for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig (Germany)
- Domenico Felice, MPI for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig (Germany)
- Carlos Gershenson, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Computer Sciences Department, Mexico City (Mexico)
- Paolo Gibilisco, Università degli Studi di Roma "Tor Vergata", Facoltà di Economia, Roma (Italy)
- Daniel Polani, University of Hertfordshire, Department of Computer Science, Hatfield (United Kingdom)
- Mikhail Prokopenko, University of Sydney, Sydney (Australia)
- Richard Spinney, University of Sydney, Sydney (Australia)
- Justin Werfel, Harvard University, Cambridge (USA)
- Larry Yaeger, Google Inc., San Francisco (USA)
- G. Çiğdem Yalçın, İstanbul Üniversitesi, İstanbul (Turkey)
Administrative Contact
Antje VandenbergMPI for Mathematics in the Sciences
Leipzig (Germany)
Contact by Email