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In the era of burgeoning data generation, managing and storing large-scale time-varying datasets poses significant challenges. With the rise of supercomputing capabilities, the volume of data produced has soared, intensifying storage and I/O overheads. To address this issue, we propose a dynamic spatio-temporal data summarization technique that identifies informative features in key timesteps and fuses less informative ones. This approach minimizes storage requirements while preserving data dynamics. Unlike existing methods, our method retains both raw and summarized timesteps, ensuring a comprehensive view of information changes over time. We utilize information-theoretic measures to guide the fusion process, resulting in a visual representation that captures essential data patterns. We demonstrate the versatility of our technique across diverse datasets, encompassing particle-based flow simulations, security and surveillance applications, and biological cell interactions within the immune system. Our research significantly contributes to the realm of data management, introducing enhanced efficiency and deeper insights across diverse multidisciplinary domains. We provide a streamlined approach for handling massive datasets that can be applied to in situ analysis as well as post hoc analysis. This not only addresses the escalating challenges of data storage and I/O overheads but also unlocks the potential for informed decision-making. Our method empowers researchers and experts to explore essential temporal dynamics while minimizing storage requirements, thereby fostering a more effective and intuitive understanding of complex data behaviors.

In 2022, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computing Research Association (CRA) to conduct a workshop to frame and scope a potential Convergence Accelerator research track on the topic of "Building Resilience to Climate-Driven Extreme Events with Computing Innovations". The CRA's research visioning committee, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), took on this task, organizing a two-part community workshop series, beginning with a small, in-person brainstorming meeting in Denver, CO on 27-28 October 2022, followed by a virtual event on 10 November 2022. The overall objective was to develop ideas to facilitate convergence research on this critical topic and encourage collaboration among researchers across disciplines. Based on the CCC community white paper entitled Computing Research for the Climate Crisis, we initially focused on five impact areas (i.e. application domains that are both important to society and critically affected by climate change): Energy, Agriculture, Environmental Justice, Transportation, and Physical Infrastructure.

In April of 2022, the Santa Fe Institute hosted a workshop on embodied, situated, and grounded intelligence as part of the Institute's Foundations of Intelligence project. The workshop brought together computer scientists, psychologists, philosophers, social scientists, and others to discuss the science of embodiment and related issues in human intelligence, and its implications for building robust, human-level AI. In this report, we summarize each of the talks and the subsequent discussions. We also draw out a number of key themes and identify important frontiers for future research., Comment: 38 pages, workshop report

In August of 2021, the Santa Fe Institute hosted a workshop on collective intelligence as part of its Foundations of Intelligence project. This project seeks to advance the field of artificial intelligence by promoting interdisciplinary research on the nature of intelligence. The workshop brought together computer scientists, biologists, philosophers, social scientists, and others to share their insights about how intelligence can emerge from interactions among multiple agents--whether those agents be machines, animals, or human beings. In this report, we summarize each of the talks and the subsequent discussions. We also draw out a number of key themes and identify important frontiers for future research., Comment: acknowledgments added

In July of 2021, the Santa Fe Institute hosted a workshop on evolutionary computation as part of its Foundations of Intelligence in Natural and Artificial Systems project. This project seeks to advance the field of artificial intelligence by promoting interdisciplinary research on the nature of intelligence. The workshop brought together computer scientists and biologists to share their insights about the nature of evolution and the future of evolutionary computation. In this report, we summarize each of the talks and the subsequent discussions. We also draw out a number of key themes and identify important frontiers for future research.

In March of 2021, the Santa Fe Institute hosted a workshop as part of its Foundations of Intelligence in Natural and Artificial Systems project. This project seeks to advance the field of artificial intelligence by promoting interdisciplinary research on the nature of intelligence. During the workshop, speakers from diverse disciplines gathered to develop a taxonomy of intelligence, articulating their own understanding of intelligence and how their research has furthered that understanding. In this report, we summarize the insights offered by each speaker and identify the themes that emerged during the talks and subsequent discussions., Comment: 30 pages, 0 figures, workshop report

Infectious diseases cause more than 13 million deaths a year, worldwide. Globalization, urbanization, climate change, and ecological pressures have significantly increased the risk of a global pandemic. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic-the first since the H1N1 outbreak more than a decade ago and the worst since the 1918 influenza pandemic-illustrates these matters vividly. More than 47M confirmed infections and 1M deaths have been reported worldwide as of November 4, 2020 and the global markets have lost trillions of dollars. The pandemic will continue to have significant disruptive impacts upon the United States and the world for years; its secondary and tertiary impacts might be felt for more than a decade. An effective strategy to reduce the national and global burden of pandemics must: 1) detect timing and location of occurrence, taking into account the many interdependent driving factors; 2) anticipate public reaction to an outbreak, including panic behaviors that obstruct responders and spread contagion; 3) and develop actionable policies that enable targeted and effective responses., Comment: A Computing Community Consortium (CCC) white paper, 8 pages

Innovations in AI have focused primarily on the questions of "what" and "how"-algorithms for finding patterns in web searches, for instance-without adequate attention to the possible harms (such as privacy, bias, or manipulation) and without adequate consideration of the societal context in which these systems operate. In part, this is driven by incentives and forces in the tech industry, where a more product-driven focus tends to drown out broader reflective concerns about potential harms and misframings. But this focus on what and how is largely a reflection of the engineering and mathematics-focused training in computer science, which emphasizes the building of tools and development of computational concepts. As a result of this tight technical focus, and the rapid, worldwide explosion in its use, AI has come with a storm of unanticipated socio-technical problems, ranging from algorithms that act in racially or gender-biased ways, get caught in feedback loops that perpetuate inequalities, or enable unprecedented behavioral monitoring surveillance that challenges the fundamental values of free, democratic societies. Given that AI is no longer solely the domain of technologists but rather of society as a whole, we need tighter coupling of computer science and those disciplines that study society and societal values., Comment: A Computing Community Consortium (CCC) white paper, 5 pages

Measurement of volcanic CO2 flux by a drone swarm poses special challenges. Drones must be able to follow gas concentration gradients while tolerating frequent drone loss. We present the LoCUS algorithm as a solution to this problem and prove its robustness. LoCUS relies on swarm coordination and self-healing to solve the task. As a point of contrast we also implement the MoBS algorithm, derived from previously published work, which allows drones to solve the task independently. We compare the effectiveness of these algorithms using drone simulations, and find that LoCUS provides a reliable and efficient solution to the volcano survey problem. Further, the novel data-structures and algorithms underpinning LoCUS have application in other areas of fault-tolerant algorithm research., Comment: Accepted to IRC 2020 (8 pages, 7 figures)

We present a foraging algorithm, GoldenFA, in which search direction is chosen based on the Golden Ratio. We show both theoretically and empirically that GoldenFA is more efficient for a single searcher than a comparable algorithm where search direction is chosen uniformly at random. Moreover, we give a variant of our algorithm that parallelizes linearly with the number of searchers., Comment: Presented at BDA 2019 (co-located with PODC 2019)

In this paper, we perform an ablation study of \neatfa, a neuro-evolved foraging algorithm that has recently been shown to forage efficiently under different resource distributions. Through selective disabling of input signals, we identify a \emph{sufficiently} minimal set of input features that contribute the most towards determining search trajectories which favor high resource collection rates. Our experiments reveal that, independent of how the resources are distributed in the arena, the signals involved in imparting the controller the ability to switch from searching of resources to transporting them back to the nest are the most critical. Additionally, we find that pheromones play a key role in boosting performance of the controller by providing signals for informed locomotion in search for unforaged resources., Comment: Presented at BDA 2019 (Colocated with PODC 2019)

The Swarmathon is a swarm robotics programming challenge that engages college students from minority-serving institutions in NASA's Journey to Mars. Teams compete by programming a group of robots to search for, pick up, and drop off resources in a collection zone. The Swarmathon produces prototypes for robot swarms that would collect resources on the surface of Mars. Robots operate completely autonomously with no global map, and each team's algorithm must be sufficiently flexible to effectively find resources from a variety of unknown distributions. The Swarmathon includes Physical and Virtual Competitions. Physical competitors test their algorithms on robots they build at their schools; they then upload their code to run autonomously on identical robots during the three day competition in an outdoor arena at Kennedy Space Center. Virtual competitors complete an identical challenge in simulation. Participants mentor local teams to compete in a separate High School Division. In the first 2 years, over 1,100 students participated. 63% of students were from underrepresented ethnic and racial groups. Participants had significant gains in both interest and core robotic competencies that were equivalent across gender and racial groups, suggesting that the Swarmathon is effectively educating a diverse population of future roboticists., Comment: Paper presented May 2018 at ICRA 2018 Workshop: "Swarms: From Biology to Robotics and Back"

Individual robots are not effective at exploring large unmapped areas. An alternate approach is to use a swarm of simple robots that work together, rather than a single highly capable robot. The central-place foraging algorithm (CPFA) is effective for coordinating robot swarm search and collection tasks. Robots start at a centrally placed location (nest), explore potential targets in the area without global localization or central control, and return the targets to the nest. The scalability of the CPFA is limited because large numbers of robots produce more inter-robot collisions and large search areas result in substantial travel costs. We address these problems with the multiple-place foraging algorithm (MPFA), which uses multiple nests distributed throughout the search area. Robots start from a randomly assigned home nest but return to the closest nest with found targets. We simulate the foraging behavior of robot swarms in the robot simulator ARGoS and employ a genetic algorithm to discover different optimized foraging strategies as swarm sizes and the number of targets are scaled up. In our experiments, the MPFA always produces higher foraging rates, fewer collisions, and lower travel and search time compared to the CPFA for the partially clustered targets distribution. The main contribution of this paper is that we systematically quantify the advantages of the MPFA (reduced travel time and collisions), the potential disadvantages (less communication among robots), and the ability of a genetic algorithm to tune MPFA parameters to mitigate search inefficiency due to less communication., Comment: Robotics: Science and Systems, Swarm robotics, Scalable System, 7 pages, 10 figures

In this paper we consider the problem of coordinating robotic systems with different kinematics, sensing and vision capabilities to achieve certain mission goals. An approach that makes use of a heterogeneous team of agents has several advantages when cost, integration of capabilities, or large search areas need to be considered. A heterogeneous team allows for the robots to become "specialized", accomplish sub-goals more effectively, and thus increase the overall mission efficiency. Two main scenarios are considered in this work. In the first case study we exploit mobility to implement a power control algorithm that increases the Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR) among certain members of the network. We create realistic sensing fields and manipulation by using the geometric properties of the sensor field-of-view and the manipulability metric, respectively. The control strategy for each agent of the heterogeneous system is governed by an artificial physics law that considers the different kinematics of the agents and the environment, in a decentralized fashion. Through simulation results we show that the network is able to stay connected at all times and covers the environment well. The second scenario studied in this paper is the biologically-inspired coordination of heterogeneous physical robotic systems. A team of ground rovers, designed to emulate desert seed-harvester ants, explore an experimental area using behaviors fine-tuned in simulation by a genetic algorithm. Our robots coordinate with a base station and collect clusters of resources scattered within the experimental space. We demonstrate experimentally that through coordination with an aerial vehicle, our ant-like ground robots are able to collect resources two times faster than without the use of heterogeneous coordination.

Distributed search problems are ubiquitous in Artificial Life (ALife). Many distributed search problems require identifying a rare and previously unseen event and producing a rapid response. This challenge amounts to finding and removing an unknown needle in a very large haystack. Traditional computational search models are unlikely to find, nonetheless, appropriately respond to, novel events, particularly given data distributed across multiple platforms in a variety of formats and sources with variable and unknown reliability. Biological systems have evolved solutions to distributed search and response under uncertainty. Immune systems and ant colonies efficiently scale up massively parallel search with automated response in highly dynamic environments, and both do so using distributed coordination without centralized control. These properties are relevant to ALife, where distributed, autonomous, robust and adaptive control is needed to design robot swarms, mobile computing networks, computer security systems and other distributed intelligent systems. They are also relevant for searching, tracking the spread of ideas, and understanding the impact of innovations in online social networks. We review design principles for Scalable Robust, Adaptive, Decentralized search with Automated Response (Scalable RADAR) in biology. We discuss how biological RADAR scales up efficiently, and then discuss in detail how modular search in the immune system can be mimicked or built upon in ALife. Such search mechanisms are particularly useful when components have limited capacity to communicate and social or physical distance makes long distance communication more costly., Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures

Many components of the IS are constructed as modular units which do not need to communicate with each other such that the number of components increases but the size remains constant. However, a sub-modular IS architecture in which lymph node number and size both increase sublinearly with body size is shown to efficiently balance the requirements of communication and migration, consistent with experimental data. We hypothesize that the IS architecture optimizes the tradeoff between local search for pathogens and global response using antibodies. Similar to natural immune systems, physical space and resource are also important constraints on Artificial Immune Systems (AIS), especially distributed systems applications used to connect low-powered sensors using short-range wireless communication. AIS problems like distributed robot control will also require a sub-modular architecture to efficiently balance the tradeoff between local search for a solution and global response or proliferation of the solution between different components., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures

Most biological rates and times decrease systematically with organism body size. We use an ordinary differential equation (ODE) model of West Nile Virus in birds to show that pathogen replication rates decline with host body size, but natural immune system (NIS) response rates do not change systematically with body size. This is surprising since the NIS has to search for small quantities of pathogens through larger physical spaces in larger organisms, and also respond by producing larger absolute quantities of antibody in larger organisms. We call this scale-invariant detection and response. We hypothesize that the NIS has evolved an architecture to efficiently neutralize pathogens. We investigate a range of architectures using an Agent Based Model (ABM). We find that a sub-modular NIS architecture, in which lymph node number and size both increase sublinearly with body size, efficiently balances the tradeoff between local pathogen detection and global response using antibodies. This leads to nearly scale-invariant detection and response, consistent with experimental data. Similar to the NIS, physical space and resources are also important constraints on Artificial Immune Systems (AIS), especially distributed systems applications used to connect low-powered sensors using short-range wireless communication. We show that AIS problems, like distributed robot control, will also require a sub-modular architecture to efficiently balance the tradeoff between local search for a solution and global response or proliferation of the solution between different components. This research has wide applicability in other distributed systems AIS applications., Comment: 23 pages, 4 figures, Swarm Intelligence journal

The Natural Immune System (NIS) is a distributed system that solves challenging search and response problems while operating under constraints imposed by physical space and resource availability. Remarkably, NIS search and response times do not scale appreciably with the physical size of the animal in which its search is conducted. Many distributed systems are engineered to solve analogous problems, and the NIS demonstrates how such engineered systems can achieve desirable scalability. We hypothesize that the architecture of the NIS, composed of a hierarchical decentralized detection network of lymph nodes (LN) facilitates efficient search and response. A sub-modular architecture in which LN numbers and size both scale with organism size is shown to efficiently balance tradeoffs between local antigen detection and global antibody production, leading to nearly scale-invariant detection and response. We characterize the tradeoffs as balancing local and global communication and show that similar tradeoffs exist in distributed systems like LN inspired artificial immune system (AIS) applications and peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. Taking inspiration from the architecture of the NIS, we propose a modular RADAR (Robust Adaptive Decentralized search with Automated Response) strategy for distributed systems. We demonstrate how two existing distributed systems (a LN inspired multi-robot control application and a P2P system) can be improved by a modular RADAR strategy. Such a sub-modular architecture is shown to balance the tradeoffs between local communication (within artificial LNs and P2P clusters) and global communication (between artificial LNs and P2P clusters), leading to efficient search and response., Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, scale invariant detection and response, distributed systems, scale invariant response, scale invariant detection, immune system scaling, modular search, modular architecture, sub-modular architecture, peer-to-peer systems, artificial immune systems, immune system modelling, intrusion detection systems, malware detection systems, mobile ad-hoc networks

Many emerging pathogens infect multiple host species, and multi-host pathogens may have very different dynamics in different host species. This research addresses how pathogen replication rates and Immune System (IS) response times are constrained by host body size. An Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) model is used to show that pathogen replication rates decline with host body size but IS response rates remain invariant with body size. An Agent-Based Model (ABM) is used to investigate two models of IS architecture that could explain scale invariance of IS response rates. A stage structured hybrid model is proposed that strikes a balance between the detailed representation of an ABM and computational tractability of an ODE, by using them in the initial and latter stages of an infection, respectively., Comment: 3 pages