Carlos Gershenson

Carlos Gershenson
Born (1978-09-29) 29 September 1978
Mexico City, Mexico
Nationality Mexican
Fields Complex systems, Computer science
Institutions Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, ITMO University Free University of Brussels
Doctoral advisor Francis Heylighen, Diederik Aerts, Bart D'Hooghe
Other academic advisors José Negrete Martínez, Inman Harvey, Yaneer Bar-Yam
Known for Research on Self-Organization, Complexity Digest
Influences William Ross Ashby, Francisco Varela, Stuart Kauffman
Influenced Tom Froese
Notable awards Team Mexico City, Audi Urban Future Award 2014,[1] Google Research Award for Latin America 2015 (among other 12 winning teams)[2]
Website
http://turing.iimas.unam.mx/~cgg/

Carlos Gershenson (born September 29, 1978) is a Mexican researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. His academic interests include self-organizing systems, complexity, and artificial life. Gershenson, among others of his colleagues, has been accused of scientific misconduct.[3]

Biography

Gershenson was born September 29, 1978 in Mexico City. He studied a BEng in Computer Engineering at the Arturo Rosenblueth Foundation in Mexico City in 2001 and a MSc in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems at the University of Sussex. He received his PhD at the Centrum Leo Apostel of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium in 2007, on "Design and Control of Self-organizing Systems", under the supervision of Francis Heylighen. He was a postdoc of Yaneer Bar-Yam at the New England Complex Systems Institute.

He is a researcher (investigador) at the Computer Science Department of the Instituto de Investigaciones en Matemáticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas (IIMAS) at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He was the head of a small Department of Computer Science from 2012 to 2015 at IIMAS that comprises about 12 staff members of which about 3 to 4 are full professors[4] and the rest lower rank positions (including Gershenson himself at the lowest ranked tenured position). The department has 2 postdocs and has had 2 postdocs in average in the past.[5] The 'head' position is rotated every about 3 years among all members of the group disregarding seniority.

He was also a 'visiting professor' at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Northeastern University during a sabbatical year and has also been editor-in-chief of an emailing list called the 'Complexity Digest' since 2009.[6]

Allegations of misconduct regarding titles that Gershenson, and other colleagues of him, assign to themselves, have been made known to the public attention through a letter to the MIT Press.[3] A senior faculty member of their home institution, UNAM, confirmed the suspicion of misuse of the titles used by Gershenson and his colleagues.[3]

Work

The work of Carlos Gershenson has been related to the understanding and popularization of topics of complex systems, in particular, related to Boolean networks, self-organization and traffic control.

Self-organizing Systems

During his PhD, Gershenson proposed heuristics to design and control self-organizing systems.[7] He noticed that self-organization cannot be judged independently of a context, i.e., it is not so relevant to decide whether a system is or not self-organizing, but when is it useful to do so.[8] The usefulness of self-organization lies in the fact that it can provide robust adaptation to changes in a system. His approach is similar to other models of traffic introduced in the 1990s that are never cited in Gershenson works. As particular cases, he studied the problems of traffic light coordination,[9] organization efficiency,[10] and communication protocols.[11]

He has also explored 'self-organizing traffic lights'[12] and also applied self-organization to public transport regulation[13][14] and other urban systems.[15]

Random Boolean Networks

During his MSc studies, Gershenson proposed a naming convention for random Boolean networks depending on their updating scheme.[16]

He has also studied the effect of redundancy[17] and modularity[18] on random Boolean networks.

ALife 2016

He is a promoter of artificial life and was the main organizer of ALIFE XV, the international Artificial Life conference, held in Cancun, Mexico in 2016. In several national newspaper interviews, Gershenson claimed that Mexico was a leader in Artificial Life in Latin America.[19][20] When questioned by journalists noticing the low to nonexistent participation of Mexican students and Mexican researchers in the conference, Gershenson explained in another national newspaper interview[21] that there were few Mexicans participating in ALIFE XV because of the high standards of the conference yet in the same interview, Gershenson also claimed that the conference had more Mexican contributions than those organized abroad.[21] The conference did not include any Mexican keynote speakers.[22] The conference fee (that included some non-optional meals and a dinner) ranged between $400 (early bird) to $800 (regular) USD, that is 100 to 200 times the Mexican daily minimum wage.

References

  1. ↑ http://audi-urban-future-initiative.com/blog/data-collectors-from-mexico-city-win-audi-urban-future-award-2014
  2. ↑ http://www.gaceta.unam.mx/20151001/galardon-a-dos-universitarios/
  3. 1 2 3 https://scientificmisconduct.wordpress.com/2016/07/10/carlos-gershenson-and-tom-froese/
  4. ↑ http://turing.iimas.unam.mx/staff_res.php?lan=en
  5. ↑ http://turing.iimas.unam.mx/staff_pphds.php?lan=en
  6. ↑ http://comdig.unam.mx
  7. ↑ Gershenson, C. (2007). Design and Control of Self-organizing Systems. CopIt Arxives, Mexico. http://scifunam.fisica.unam.mx/mir/copit/TS0002EN/TS0002EN.html
  8. ↑ Gershenson, C. and Heylighen, F. (2003). When can we call a system self- organizing? In Banzhaf, W., Christaller, T., Dittrich, P., Kim, J. T., and Ziegler, J., editors, Advances in Artificial Life, 7th European Conference, ECAL 2003 LNAI 2801, pages 606–614, Berlin. Springer. http://arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0303020
  9. ↑ Gershenson, C (2005). "Self-organizing traffic lights" (PDF). Complex Systems. 16 (1): 29–53.
  10. ↑ Gershenson, C (2008). "Towards self-organizing bureaucracies". International Journal of Public Information Systems. 2008 (1): 1–24.
  11. ↑ Gershenson, C. and Heylighen, F. (2011). Protocol requirements for self- organizing artifacts: Towards an ambient intelligence. In Minai, A., Braha, D., and Bar-Yam, Y., editors, Unifying Themes in Complex Systems, volume V, pages 136–143. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg. http://arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0404004
  12. ↑ Gershenson, C.; Rosenblueth, D. A. (2012). "Self-organizing traffic lights at multiple-street intersections". Complexity. 17 (4): 23–39. doi:10.1002/cplx.20392.
  13. ↑ Gershenson, C.; Pineda, L. A. (2009). "Why does public transport not arrive on time? The pervasiveness of equal headway instability". PLoS ONE. 4 (10): e7292. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007292.
  14. ↑ Gershenson, C (2011). "Self-organization leads to supraoptimal performance in public transportation systems". PLoS ONE. 6 (6): e21469. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0021469.
  15. ↑ Gershenson, C (2013). "Living in living cities". Artificial Life. 19 (3-4): 401–420. doi:10.1162/ARTL_a_00112.
  16. ↑ Classification of random Boolean networks. In Standish, R. K., Bedau, M. A., and Abbass, H. A., editors, Artificial Life VIII: Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Artificial Life, pages 1–8, Cambridge, MA, USA. MIT Press. http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0208001
  17. ↑ Gershenson, C., Kauffman, S. A., and Shmulevich, I. (2006). The role of redundancy in the robustness of random Boolean networks. In Rocha, L. M., Yaeger, L. S., Bedau, M. A., Floreano, D., Goldstone, R. L., and Vespignani, A., editors, Artificial Life X, Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems., pages 35–42. MIT Press. http://arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0511018
  18. ↑ Poblanno-Balp, R.; Gershenson, C. (2011). "Modular random Boolean networks". Artificial Life. 17 (4): 331–351. arXiv:1101.1893Freely accessible. doi:10.1162/artl_a_00042.
  19. ↑ http://www.cronica.com.mx/notas/2016/964608.html
  20. ↑ http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/articulo/cultura/patrimonio/2016/07/5/vida-artificial-la-vida-como-podria-ser
  21. 1 2 http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/articulo/ciencia-y-salud/ciencia/2016/07/5/pocos-mexicanos-en-alife-2016
  22. ↑ http://xva.life/pagina-ejemplo/keynotes/

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