Amsterdam, 27th of April 2009: Sander van Splunter is one of the colleagues at the Intelligent Interactive Distributed Systems group. Since we all travel and spend lots of time in the tunnels of our
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Sander van Splunter
Adaptation in complex systems
person
Sander van Splunter is a researcher at the Intelligent Interactive Distributed Systems (IIDS) ( www.iids.org ) at VU University Amsterdam, and at D-CIS lab in Delft.
Caroline
Sander
Sander van Splunter has been investigating how complex software can adapt by itself. One of the issues he focussed on was whether a local small change has an effect on the whole system. His research
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Time is an issue because of a-synchronicity. In distributing programs time is an issue because the same time cannot be tracked on different locations. For computers, of course, time is not as
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There are time-based protocols to regulate interactions between computers. These protocols can be considered as rhythm based for regular transactions and if something disrupts the rhythm then either
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When discussing the example of the tabla player, who could change any delay into a different beat, van Splunter emphasizes the fact that the tabla player can hear the rhythm, where computers do not
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The place of a computer could be defined by the locality of its inputs (keyboard, mouse and monitor). However, in a network environment the place of a computer is less evident. Computers on the other
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In distributed environments the issue of trust is significant. Therefore a distinction is made between trusted and non-trusted environments. In these environments the kind of interactions differ
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Values within the design of distributed systems are a push and pull between transparency, traceability, security and privacy. Human values are very much bound to location oriented, says van Splunter.
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Human beings can only witness the system by the grace of the designers: the error-logs and pop-up screens saying ‘something went wrong, sorry’. Observations of the system need to be transformed
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Using language in a computer environment is one of the ways to communicate with the computer itself. Instructions are a natural way to communicate with the computer. However, there is not that much
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When asked about the story of the potter who gets centred by the wheel, who creates a centred pot, which centres the woman and creates a centred community, van Splunter points out that this is
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Humans have relations on many levels and the same goes for computers. But if systems want to reason about relations, the system has to have the right specifications.
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Performance is always based on and limited to a specific application of systems as it is for humans. If you are searching for a certain book than the result is more important than the response time.
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Full transcript including film fragments you find at: http://www.systemsdesign.tbm.tudelft.nl/witness
Hereunder the transcript in text.
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