We seek to increase user confidence in simulations as they are adapted to meet new requirements. Our approach includes formal representation of uncertainty, lightweight validation, and novel techniques for exploring emergent behavior. Uncertainty representation, using formalisms such as Dempster-Shafer theory, can capture designer insight about uncertainty, enabling formal analysis and improvin...

We present a formal framework for the identification and interpretation of emergent properties in environments where agents participate in distinct kinds of relations or networks. We focus here on the interplay between social and geographic relations in the behavior of our agents. The method we present provides a way to detect emergent properties in the interaction of distinguishable forms of n...

Internet communication is developing. Social networking sites enable patients to publish and receive communications very easily. Many stakeholders, including patients, are using these media to find new ways to make sense of diseases, to find and discuss treatments, and to give support to patients and their caregivers. We argue for a new definition of patient-reported information (PRI), which di...

Teamwork and good communication are central to the provision of high-quality care. A standardized focus-group protocol was used. Analysis assessed emergent themes of patient safety-related effective and problematic clinician communication. Sixty-three focus groups were conducted with clinicians from five Chicago Pediatric Patient Safety Consortium hospitals. Effective and problematic clinician-...

epistemologically speaking, second language acquisition research (slar) might be reconsidered from a complex dynamical system view with interconnected aspects in the ecosystem of language acquisition. the present paper attempts to introduce the tenets of complex system theory and its application in slar. it has been suggested that the present dominant traditions in language acquisition research...

The second-generation Web has amplified and extended new ways of online communication. Millions of people now interact through blogs, collaborate through wikis, play multiplayer games, publish podcasts and video, build relationships through social network sites, and evaluate all the above forms of communication through feedback and ranking mechanisms. This article analyzes the emergent semiotic...

Swarm Microrobotics aims to apply Swarm Intelligence algorithms and strategies to a large number of fabricated miniaturized autonomous or semi-autonomous agents, allowing collective, decentralized and self-organizing behaviors of the robots. The ability to establish basic information networking is fundamental in such swarm systems, where inter-robot communication is the base of emergent behavio...

We examine how streams of communication enable the reproduction and change of the underlying principles that constitute institutional logics. While past research has shown that communication provides instantiations of institutional logics, the link between specific instances of communication and the emergence of institutional logics has not been explicitly shown. To remedy this gap, we propose ...