What is a Complex System

Birds flocking, an immune system responding, traffic waves developing on a freeway; each of these systems is best seen not as a single function or equation, but as the result of a number of interacting entities called agents. When they interact in certain ways, they generate emergent behavior like flocking that would have been hard to predict from looking at the individual agents.

Resources for Studying Complexity

Here are some resources to help you get started in studying the type of applied complexity science that I investigated in my dissertation.

Books:

• Signals and Boundaries (John Holland)
• Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (Sutton and Barto)

Games:

• Turing Complete (Steam) Learn How Computers Work.
• Shapez IO (Steam and Online). Design Processing Networks.

Tools:

• Complex Adaptive Systems Architect (CASA). A tool I made for developing distributed adaptive systems: Github
• Draw.IO: A tool for diagramming which can also be hooked into CASA as a front end.

Engineering for Complexity

Whenever systems and agents interact, there is the potential for complex behavior. As the world of engineering expands into nano-technology, biological systems, and the Internet of Things, the challenge of complexity will move from mitigating to harnessing these key dynamics. I'm excited to help transfer the theory and knowledge of complexity into practice.

Dissertation: "Signal Based Reinforcement Learning: Studying the Behavior of Adaptive Agents on Signal Flows

You can read the dissertation in its entirety for free here: Link

Supporting Code

• Chapter 3: Epsilon Random Evaluation for Genetic Algorithms. Link
• Chapter 4: Stochastic Policy Mixing. Link
• Chapter 5: Complex Adaptive Systems Architect. Link

Other Public Work

Below are a few of my other publicly accessible works:

• Predictive Data-driven Platform for Subsurface Energy Production
• Task Analysis on Yoga Poses Toward a Wearable Sensor based Learning System (PDF)
• Control Failures in an Unmanned Aerial System and the Potential for Stateless Control
• Dynamic Obstacle Characterization and Avoidance for Unmanned Aerial Systems