Computational Experiments for Complex Social Systems:Experiment Design and Generative Explanation

Powered by advanced information technology,more and more complex systems are exhibiting characteristics of the cyber-physical-social systems(CPSS).In this context,computational experiments method has emerged as a novel approach for the design,analysis,management,control,and integration of CPSS,which can realize the causal analysis of complex systems by means of“algorithmization”of“counterfactuals”.However,because CPSS involve human and social factors(e.g.,autonomy,initiative,and sociality),it is difficult for traditional design of experiment(DOE)methods to achieve the generative explanation of system emergence.To address this challenge,this paper proposes an integrated approach to the design of computational experiments,incorporating three key modules:1)Descriptive module:Determining the influencing factors and response variables of the system by means of the modeling of an artificial society;2)Interpretative module:Selecting factorial experimental design solution to identify the relationship between influencing factors and macro phenomena;3)Predictive module:Building a meta-model that is equivalent to artificial society to explore its operating laws.Finally,a case study of crowd-sourcing platforms is presented to illustrate the application process and effectiveness of the proposed approach,which can reveal the social impact of algorithmic behavior on“rider race”.

Automation 5.0: The Key to Systems Intelligence and Industry 5.0

AUTOMATION has come a long way since the early days of mechanization,i.e.,the process of working exclusively by hand or using animals to work with machinery.The rise of steam engines and water wheels represented the first generation of industry,which is now called Industry Citation:L.Vlacic,H.Huang,M.Dotoli,Y.Wang,P.Ioanno,L.Fan,X.Wang,R.Carli,C.Lv,L.Li,X.Na,Q.-L.Han,and F.-Y.Wang,“Automation 5.0:The key to systems intelligence and Industry 5.0,”IEEE/CAA J.Autom.Sinica,vol.11,no.8,pp.1723-1727,Aug.2024.

New Control Paradigm for Industry 5.0:From Big Models to Foundation Control and Management

DO we need a fundamental change in our professional culture and knowledge foundation for control and automation?If so,what are necessary and critical steps we must take to ensure such a change would take place effectively and efficiently,or more general,smoothly and sustainably?

The DAO to MetaControl for MetaSystems in Metaverses:The System of Parallel Control Systems for Knowledge Automation and Control Intelligence in CPSS

An investigation and outline of MetaControl and DeControl in Metaverses for control intelligence and knowledge automation are presented.Prescriptive control with prescriptive knowledge and parallel philosophy is proposed as the starting point for the new control philosophy and technology,especially for computational control of metasystems in cyberphysical-social systems.We argue that circular causality,the generalized feedback mechanism for complex and purposive systems,should be adapted as the fundamental principle for control and management of metasystems with metacomplexity in metaverses.Particularly,an interdisciplinary approach is suggested for MetaControl and DeControl as a new form of intelligent control based on five control metaverses:MetaVerses,MultiVerses,InterVerses,TransVerse,and DeepVerses.

When Does Sora Show:The Beginning of TAO to Imaginative Intelligence and Scenarios Engineering

DURING our discussion at workshops for writing“What Does ChatGPT Say:The DAO from Algorithmic Intelligence to Linguistic Intelligence”[1],we had expected the next milestone for Artificial Intelligence(AI)would be in the direction of Imaginative Intelligence(II),i.e.,something similar to automatic wordsto-videos generation or intelligent digital movies/theater technology that could be used for conducting new“Artificiofactual Experiments”[2]to replace conventional“Counterfactual Experiments”in scientific research and technical development for both natural and social studies[2]-[6].Now we have OpenAI’s Sora,so soon,but this is not the final,actually far away,and it is just the beginning.

The Journey/DAO/TAO of Embodied Intelligence: From Large Models to Foundation Intelligence and Parallel Intelligence

THE tremendous impact of large models represented by ChatGPT[1]-[3]makes it necessary to con-sider the practical applications of such models[4].However,for an artificial intelligence(AI)to truly evolve,it needs to possess a physical“body”to transition from the virtual world to the real world and evolve through interaction with the real environments.In this context,“embodied intelligence”has sparked a new wave of research and technology,leading AI beyond the digital realm into a new paradigm that can actively act and perceive in a physical environment through tangible entities such as robots and automated devices[5].

ChatGPT Chats on Computational Experiments:From Interactive Intelligence to Imaginative Intelligence for Design of Artificial Societies and Optimization of Foundational Models

POWERED by the rapid development of Internet,the penetration of the Internet of Things,the emergence of big data,and the rise of social media,more and more complex systems are exhibiting the characteristics of social,physical,and information fusion.These systems are known as cyber-physicalsocial systems(CPSS)[1],[2].These CPSS face unprecedented challenges in design,analysis,management,control and integration due to their involvement with human and social factors[3],[4].To cope with this challenge,there are two main approaches to CPSS research.

Urban Traffic Control Meets Decision Recommendation System:A Survey and Perspective

Urban traffic control is a multifaceted and demanding task that necessitates extensive decision-making to ensure the safety and efficiency of urban transportation systems.Traditional approaches require traffic signal professionals to manually intervene on traffic control devices at the intersection level,utilizing their knowledge and expertise.However,this process is cumbersome,labor-intensive,and cannot be applied on a large network scale.Recent studies have begun to explore the applicability of recommendation system for urban traffic control,which offer increased control efficiency and scalability.Such a decision recommendation system is complex,with various interdependent components,but a systematic literature review has not yet been conducted.In this work,we present an up-to-date survey that elucidates all the detailed components of a recommendation system for urban traffic control,demonstrates the utility and efficacy of such a system in the real world using data and knowledgedriven approaches,and discusses the current challenges and potential future directions of this field.

Deep Reinforcement Learning or Lyapunov Analysis?A Preliminary Comparative Study on Event-Triggered Optimal Control

Dear Editor,This letter develops a novel method to implement event-triggered optimal control(ETOC) for discrete-time nonlinear systems using parallel control and deep reinforcement learning(DRL), referred to as Deep-ETOC. The developed Deep-ETOC method introduces the communication cost into the performance index through parallel control, so that the developed method enables control systems to learn ETOC policies directly without triggering conditions.

The engineering of circular causality for specialization and design of complex systems:cad2CAS and casCAD2

The emergence of decentralized autonomous organizations and operations(DAOs),equipped with innovative mechanisms,enables new possibilities for transforming traditional social collaborative relationships.Mechanisms are the underlying driver for DAOs.However,as a complex system encompassing both social complexity and engineering complexity.

Parallel Learning:Overview and Perspective for Computational Learning Across Syn2Real and Sim2Real

The virtual-to-real paradigm,i.e.,training models on virtual data and then applying them to solve real-world problems,has attracted more and more attention from various domains by successfully alleviating the data shortage problem in machine learning.To summarize the advances in recent years,this survey comprehensively reviews the literature,from the viewport of parallel intelligence.First,an extended parallel learning framework is proposed to cover main domains including computer vision,natural language processing,robotics,and autonomous driving.Second,a multi-dimensional taxonomy is designed to organize the literature in a hierarchical structure.Third,the related virtual-toreal works are analyzed and compared according to the three principles of parallel learning known as description,prediction,and prescription,which cover the methods for constructing virtual worlds,generating labeled data,domain transferring,model training and testing,as well as optimizing the strategies to guide the task-oriented data generator for better learning performance.Key issues remained in virtual-to-real are discussed.Furthermore,the future research directions from the viewpoint of parallel learning are suggested.

Chat with ChatGPT on Industry 5.0:Learning and Decision-Making for Intelligent Industries

THE current ChatGPT phenomenon has signaled a new era of Artificial Intelligence moving from Algorithmic Intelligence to Linguistic Intelligence where interactive activities between actual and artificial,real and virtual,human and machine play an active and important role online and in real-time.At IEEE/CAA JAS,we are interested in investigating the impact and significance of this new era on industrial development,especially control and automation for manufacturing and production.

Can ChatGPT Boost Artistic Creation:The Need of Imaginative Intelligence for Parallel Art

CHATGPT,one of the leading Large Language Models(LLMs),has acquired linguistic capabilities such as text comprehension and logical reasoning,enabling it to engage in natural conversations with humans.

The TAO of Blockchain Intelligence for Intelligent Web 3.0

WE are in an exciting new intelligent era where various Web 3.0 systems emerge and flourish.[1]–[3].In this new epoch,the collaboration of data and knowledge,humans and machines,actual and virtual worlds is undergoing an unprecedented diversification and community-driven transformation,unveiling an open future full of boundless possibilities.However,the value of dispersed data extends far beyond passive storage and application.

Can Digital Intelligence and Cyber-Physical-Social Systems Achieve Global Food Security and Sustainability?

Plants sequester carbon through photosynthesis and provide primary productivity for the ecosystem. However, they also simultaneously consume water through transpiration, leading to a carbon-water balance relationship. Agricultural production can be regarded as a form of carbon sequestration behavior.From the perspective of the natural-social-economic complex ecosystem, excessive water usage in food production will aggravate regional water pressure for both domestic and industrial purposes. Hence, achieving a harmonious equilibrium between carbon and water resources during the food production process is a key scientific challenge for ensuring food security and sustainability. Digital intelligence(DI) and cyber-physical-social systems(CPSS) are emerging as the new research paradigms that are causing a substantial shift in the conventional thinking and methodologies across various scientific fields, including ecological science and sustainability studies. This paper outlines our recent efforts in using advanced technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence(AI), digital twins, metaverses, and parallel intelligence to model, analyze, and manage the intricate dynamics and equilibrium among plants, carbon, and water in arid and semiarid ecosystems. It introduces the concept of the carbon-water balance and explores its management at three levels: the individual plant level, the community level, and the natural-social-economic complex ecosystem level. Additionally, we elucidate the significance of agricultural foundation models as fundamental technologies within this context. A case analysis of water usage shows that, given the limited availability of water resources in the context of the carbon-water balance, regional collaboration and optimized allocation have the potential to enhance the utilization efficiency of water resources in the river basin. A suggested approach is to consider the river basin as a unified entity and coordinate the relationship between the upstream, midstream and downstream areas. Furthermore, establishing mechanisms for water resource transfer and trade among different industries can be instrumental in maximizing the benefits derived from water resources.Finally, we envisage a future of agriculture characterized by the integration of digital, robotic and biological farming techniques.This vision aims to incorporate small tasks, big models, and deep intelligence into the regular ecological practices of intelligent agriculture.

Digital CEOs in Digital Enterprises:Automating,Augmenting,and Parallel in Metaverse/CPSS/TAOs

BIG models or foundation models are rapidly emerging as a key force in advancing intelligent societies[1]–[3]Their significance stems not only from their exceptional ability to process complex data and simulate advanced cognitive functions,but also from their potential to drive innovation across various industries.

Point Cloud Classification Using Content-Based Transformer via Clustering in Feature Space

Recently, there have been some attempts of Transformer in 3D point cloud classification. In order to reduce computations, most existing methods focus on local spatial attention,but ignore their content and fail to establish relationships between distant but relevant points. To overcome the limitation of local spatial attention, we propose a point content-based Transformer architecture, called PointConT for short. It exploits the locality of points in the feature space(content-based), which clusters the sampled points with similar features into the same class and computes the self-attention within each class, thus enabling an effective trade-off between capturing long-range dependencies and computational complexity. We further introduce an inception feature aggregator for point cloud classification, which uses parallel structures to aggregate high-frequency and low-frequency information in each branch separately. Extensive experiments show that our PointConT model achieves a remarkable performance on point cloud shape classification. Especially, our method exhibits 90.3% Top-1 accuracy on the hardest setting of ScanObjectN N. Source code of this paper is available at https://github.com/yahuiliu99/PointC onT.

Parallel Building: A Complex System Approach for Smart Building Energy Management

These days' smart buildings have high intensive information and massive operational parameters, not only extensive power consumption. With the development of computation capability and future 5 G, the ACP theory(i.e., artificial systems,computational experiments, and parallel computing) will play a much more crucial role in modeling and control of complex systems like commercial and academic buildings. The necessity of making accurate predictions of energy consumption out of a large number of operational parameters has become a crucial problem in smart buildings. Previous attempts have been made to seek energy consumption predictions based on historical data in buildings. However, there are still questions about parallel building consumption prediction mechanism using a large number of operational parameters. This article proposes a novel hybrid deep learning prediction approach that utilizes long short-term memory as an encoder and gated recurrent unit as a decoder in conjunction with ACP theory. The proposed approach is tested and validated by real-world dataset, and the results outperformed traditional predictive models compared in this paper.

Social Radars: Finding Targets in Cyberspace for Cybersecurity

INSPIRED by the insight from American political scientist Lasswell, who summarized the environmental role in societal surveillance [1], Schramm coined the term “social radar” [2] as it resembles the activities of radar in collecting and processing information, playing a crucial role in helping humans perceive changes in the internal and external environment and promptly adjusting adaptive behaviors.

Consensus Control of Leader-Following Multi-Agent Systems in Directed Topology With Heterogeneous Disturbances

This paper investigates the consensus problem for linear multi-agent systems with the heterogeneous disturbances generated by the Brown motion.Its main contribution is that a control scheme is designed to achieve the dynamic consensus for the multi-agent systems in directed topology interfered by stochastic noise.In traditional ways,the coupling weights depending on the communication structure are static.A new distributed controller is designed based on Riccati inequalities,while updating the coupling weights associated with the gain matrix by state errors between adjacent agents.By introducing time-varying coupling weights into this novel control law,the state errors between leader and followers asymptotically converge to the minimum value utilizing the local interaction.Through the Lyapunov directed method and It?formula,the stability of the closed-loop system with the proposed control law is analyzed.Two simulation results conducted by the new and traditional schemes are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and advantage of the developed control method.