Emergent Systems Lab @ WPI
The Emergent Systems Lab (ESL) is a research laboratory
associated with the Interdisciplinary
and Global Studies Division of the Worcester Polytechnic
Institute (WPI).
ESL is
dedicated to the study, design and development of emergent systems in any area
of human endeavor. Initial forays in
this realm are going to focus on:
1.
The
Emergence of City Knowledge
2.
The
Emergence of City Sounds
3.
The
Emergence of Manuscript Transcriptions
In conjunction with City Lab, ESL focuses on the emergent
mechanisms that will allow a self-paced, gradual collection of city knowledge to
accumulate over time with the least amount of intervention from a central
authority. This area of research is
inspired by Prof. Carrera’s Ph.D. Dissertation at MIT where the Emergence of
City Knowledge was
first formulated.
WPI has initiated a series of projects intended to
document sounds that characterize cities from around the world. In the context of such initiative, we are
exploring ways to elicit submissions of sound samples (MP3) as potential candidates
for inclusion in the “Sounds of” collection for a particular town. A self-regulating system of feedback will
make the more characteristic sounds emerge from all the submissions.
This project aims at leveraging the work of the thousands
of frequent or occasional visitors of the world’s archives to accumulate and
disseminate the raw transcriptions produced by this army of volunteers who are
digging into this treasure-trove of information from our antiquity. Since written records of our past are by
definition finite, our system promises to capture – once and for all – the
written record that our ancestors left behind by eliminating redundancy and by
creating a cumulative, distributed, emergent electronic repository of digital
transcriptions of all of the written records form our past.
Emergent Systems Laboratory [Homepage,
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