The world is changing, and so must the data that describes its history. Not surprisingly, considerable research effort has been spent in Databases along this direction, covering topics such as temporal models and schema evolution. A topic that has not received much attention, however, is that of concept evolution. For example, Germany (instance-level concept) has evolved several times in the la...

This special issue reports on approaches that address the issue of analyzing and visualizing the evolution of large-scale software. These approaches were discussed during the IEEE Workshop on Evolution of Large-Scale Industrial Software Evolution (ELISA), which was co-located with the International Conference on Software Maintenance in Amsterdam in September 2003. After a thorough review proces...

This paper illustrates selected Smalltalk mechanisms supporting software system evolution. System modifications considered are the renaming of a class, the removal of a class, and the change of the layout of a class. The mechanisms discussed are in use in Smalltalk implementations for a long time and have proven to be effective for unanticipated software evolution. This paper gives a retrospect...

We attempt to provide a comprehensive answer to the question of whether, and when, an arrow of complexity emerges in Darwinian evolution. We note that this expression can be interpreted in different ways, including a passive, incidental growth, or a pervasive bias towards complexification. We argue at length that an arrow of complexity does indeed occur in evolution, which can be most reasonabl...

Language is systematically structured at all levels of description, arguably setting it apart from all other instances of communication in nature. In this article, I survey work over the last 20 years that emphasises the contributions of individual learning, cultural transmission, and biological evolution to explaining the structural design features of language. These 3 complex adaptive systems...

Evolutionary technique differential evolution (DE) is used for the evolutionary tuning of controller parameters for the stabilization of set of different chaotic systems. The novelty of the approach is that the selected controlled discrete dissipative chaotic system is used also as the chaotic pseudorandom number generator to drive the mutation and crossover process in the DE. The idea was to u...

The paper examines the existence of pseudo almost periodic solutions to some classes of partial hyperbolic evolution equations. Namely, sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of pseudo almost periodic solutions to those classes of hyperbolic evolution equations are given. Applications include the existence of pseudo almost periodic solutions to the transport and heat equations w...

Working within the classic supernovae-driven wind framework for elliptical galaxy evolution, we perform a systematic investigation into the discrepancies between the predictions of three contemporary codes – Arimoto & Yoshii (1987, A&A, 173, 23), Bressan et al. (1994, ApJS, 94, 63), and Gibson (1996a, MNRAS, 278, 829; 1996b, MNRAS, submitted). By being primarily concerned with reproducing the p...

We show that the Fredholm spectrum of an evolution semigroup {E}t≥0 is equal to its spectrum, and prove that the ranges of the operator Et − I and the generator G of the evolution semigroup are closed simultaneously. The evolution semigroup is acting on spaces of functions with values in a Banach space, and is induced by an evolution family that could be the propagator for a well-posed linear d...