Mark Burgess

Mark Burgess
Researcher and Advisor at ChiTek-i

Professor of Networks and Systems, PhD, BSc
Research associated with spacetime process mapping for large scale infrastructure and automated knowledge representation

About

241
Publications
48,163
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1,991
Citations
Introduction
Currently working on promise theory, system resilience principles, the semantics of spacetime and semantic spaces, with the aim of modelling smart infrastructure, cities and datacentres
Additional affiliations
May 2005 - May 2010
Oslo Metropolitan University
Position
  • Professor (Full)
Description
  • Professor of Networks and Systems
May 1994 - May 2005
Oslo College of Engineering
Position
  • Lecturer
May 1993 - May 1993
The University of Winnipeg
Position
  • Visiting researcher
Education
October 1984 - October 1990
Newcastle University
Field of study
  • Physics

Publications

Publications (241)
Article
Full-text available
Human communities have self-organizing properties in which specific Dunbar Numbers may be invoked to explain group attachments. By analysing Wikipedia editing histories across a wide range of subject pages, we show that there is an emergent coherence in the size of transient groups formed to edit the content of subject texts, with two peaks averagi...
Preprint
Full-text available
The capacity to engage with technology requires cooperation within communities. Cooperation depends on trust, with trust dependent on the frequency of interaction. This natural basis for human interaction gives rise to a 'fractal' structure for human communities that reflects the patterns of contact between individuals. To understand how innovation...
Preprint
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This work is about exploring the semantics and dynamics of motion on graph spacetimes. How, for example, is something like uniform motion in a straight line possible? From a transition perspective it is highly unnatural and yet it's physical law no. 1! This rounds of a series of notes about motion as a Promise Theory signal phenomenon, called Motio...
Preprint
Full-text available
THIS IS A MODIFICATION OF AN EARLIER TITLED WORK GROUP PHENOMENA etc Human communities have self-organizing properties in which specific Dunbar Numbers may be invoked to explain group attachments. By analyzing Wikipedia editing histories across a wide range of subject pages, we show that there is an emergent coherence in the size of transient group...
Experiment Findings
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This work is part of the study of trust sponsored by NLnet. This document is a concise final summary and "user guide" for trust.
Method
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This work is part of the study of trust sponsored by NL net. In the penultimate contribution, we look for ways to use machine learning to assemble data into a form suitable for actionable algorithms. At the end of this work, we are left with a number of techniques that can be applied to different circumstances. There is no one-size-fits-all approa...
Method
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In this part of the project there is no new analysis. The bulk of the work lies in checking results, in designing a data model that represents the process, based on the semantic spacetime toolkit, and debugging the database. This is a fairly trivial task, but a lot of coding and cross checking is needed to prepare the database for the model. There...
Preprint
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We present a simple argument using Promise Theory and dimensional analysis for the Dunbar scaling hierarchy, supported by recent data from group formation in Wikipedia editing. We show how the assumption of a common priority seeds group alignment until the costs associated with attending to the group outweigh the benefits in a detailed balance scen...
Preprint
Full-text available
We report on the emergence of predictable group sizes for content editing on Wikipedia, and use these to propose an explanation of group dynamics. The data show an emergent coherence in the sizes of groups formed transiently to edit the content of subject texts, with two peaks averaging at around N = 8 for the size corresponding to maximal contenti...
Method
Full-text available
This is part 7 of the time-limited project with NLnet, whose goal is to think about the possible role of trust and trustworthiness in shaping our online cyborg societal future, and in particular to review the use of machine learning analytics to explore tools which help agents assess and adapt to trust. In particular, how do we secure the reliabili...
Experiment Findings
Full-text available
See http://markburgess.org/trustproject.html
Chapter
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18 min read · Just now Listen Share More Whether we're talking about the animal kingdom, human collaborations, teamwork, or just choosy people, it's a common narrative: birds of a feather (i.e. members in a group) flock together because they "sort of trust their own". The recent work I've been doing about trust shows that-in fact-the opposite might...
Method
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We look at the role of trust in online life. Much of online life involves behaviours and attitudes based on text information, blogs, articles, news, chats, and changelogs for submitted transactions. Here we apply the trust model to these cases. This refers to the program code wikipedia history.go. Picking Wikipedia as a data source, we combine the...
Method
Full-text available
This is the second part of a set of notes describing a proof of concept implementation for using the Promise Theory of trust. This part of the project concerns an approach for assessing the intentional semantics of agents over short lived interactions: i) for first time meetings, and ii) for rarefied transient encounters, where we can't rely on ste...
Method
Full-text available
This is not a scientific paper. It is the first part of a set of notes describing and illustrating a proof of concept for using the Promise Theory of trust to i) trace, and ii) adapt online interactions based on learning. Trust plays a role in human behaviour, and here we consider how it operates as a summary potential for human-machine interaction...
Preprint
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This work presents a summary of an operational model for trust and trustability (trustworthiness), building on Promise Theory, as a memory mechanism for time managing cooperation against future returns. The model was proposed and partially developed more extensively in previously available notes, also containing detailed reference literature. Trust...
Research
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This document is background material for the forthcoming Promise Theory of trust. It contains notes on the research literature from a number of disciplines. It's secondary motivation is to comment informally on the extent to which independent research is compatible a priori with Promise Theory, it's definitions and its predictions. A precise summar...
Preprint
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This discussion is aimed at a mixed audience of social theorists and physicists. It proposes to use a formalization of 'trust' as an interaction potential for predicting social behaviours-analogous to the use of energy in physics. It builds on details previously established for virtual processes. Progress in physics advanced quickly once the concep...
Preprint
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A scaled replica of a quantum Bell experiment is constructed using autonomous (local) software agents communicating deterministically over a simple read-write channel. This demonstrates the phenomenon of entanglement in a localized or distributed concurrent computer system. By controlling time rates carefully, we replicate a 'godlike view' of a low...
Preprint
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In part I of these notes, it was shown how to give meaning to the concept of virtual motion, based on position and velocity, from the more fundamental perspective of autonomous agents and promises. In these follow up notes, we examine how to scale mechanical assessments like energy, position and momentum. These may be translated, with the addition...
Preprint
Full-text available
We describe a policy-based approach to the scaling of shared data services, using a hierarchy of calibrated data pipelines to automate the continuous integration of data flows. While there is no unique solution to the problem of time order, we show how to use a fair interleaving to reproduce reliable 'latest version' semantics in a controlled way,...
Preprint
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A statistical measure of dimension is used to compute the effective average space dimension for the Internet and other graphs, based on typed edges (links) from an ensemble of starting points. The method is applied to CAIDA's ITDK data for the Internet. The effective dimension at different scales is calibrated to the conventional Euclidean dimensio...
Article
Series of articles on Medium about Semantic Spacetime and graph based process modelling https://mark-burgess-oslo-mb.medium.com/list/semantic-spacetime-and-data-analytics-28e9649c0ade
Preprint
Authority is a central concept in social systems, but it has a variety of meanings. Promise Theory offers a simple formalized understanding of authority, and its origins, as polarization within a network of collaborative interactions. This idealized approximation stands in contrast to the usual deontic view of authority in socio-philosophical liter...
Preprint
Full-text available
Virtual motion is a description of how observable properties move from location to location as a side effect of interior agent processes. Waves are one example of virtual motion-where a displacement function changes against the fixed positions of some medium as information. Other examples can be found in cloud computing, mobile telecommunications,...
Preprint
Full-text available
In system operations it is commonly assumed that arbitrary changes to a system can be reversed or `rolled back', when errors of judgement and procedure occur. We point out that this view is flawed and provide an alternative approach to determining the outcome of changes. Convergent operators are fixed-point generators that stem from the basic prope...
Preprint
Full-text available
Authority is a central concept in social systems, but it has a variety of meanings. Promise Theory offers a simple formalized understanding of authority, and its origins, as polarization within a network of collaborative interactions. This idealized approximation stands in contrast to the usual deontic view of authority in socio-philosophical liter...
Article
Full-text available
Promise Theory concerns the 'alignment', i.e. the degree of functional compatibility and the 'scaling' properties of process outcomes in agent-based models, with causality and intentional semantics. It serves as an umbrella for other theories of interaction, from physics to socio-economics, integrating dynamical and semantic concerns into a single...
Preprint
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This version has been superceded by https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351250769_Authority_I_A_Promise_Theoretic_Formalization Authority is a central concept in social systems. Authority has been defined many times and has several accepted patterns of usage. Promise Theory offers a simple formalized understanding of authority and its origins...
Preprint
Full-text available
This note is a guide to ongoing work and literature about the Semantic Spacetime Hypothesis: a model of cognition rooted in Promise Theory and the physics of scale. This article may be updated with new developments. Semantic Spacetime is a model of space and time in terms of agents and their interactions. It places dynamics and semantics on an equa...
Preprint
Full-text available
Given a pool of observations selected from a sensor stream, input data can be robustly represented, via a multiscale process, in terms of invariant concepts, and themes. Applying this to episodic natural language data, one may obtain a graph geometry associated with the decomposition, which is a direct encoding of spacetime relationships for the ev...
Preprint
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The problem of extracting important and meaningful parts of a sensory data stream, without prior training, is studied for symbolic sequences, by using textual narrative as a test case. This is part of a larger study concerning the extraction of concepts from spacetime processes, and their knowledge representations within hybrid symbolic-learning `A...
Preprint
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Promise Theory concerns the alignment and scaling of process outcomes in agent models. It serves as an umbrella for other theories of interaction from physics to socio-economics. We review some structural details of Promise Theory, applied to Promises of the First Kind, to assist in the comparison of Promise Theory with other forms of physical and...
Preprint
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The explicit link between Promise Theory and Information Theory, while perhaps obvious, is laid out explicitly here. It's shown how causally related observations of promised behaviours relate to the probabilistic formulation of causal information in Shannon's theory, and thus clarify the meaning of autonomy or causal independence, and further the c...
Preprint
Full-text available
By reasoning about the claims and speculations promised as part of the public discourse, we analyze the hypothesis that flaws in software engineering played a critical role in the Boeing 737 MCAS incidents. We use promise-based reasoning to discuss how, from an outsider's perspective, one may assemble clues about what went wrong. Rather than lookin...
Preprint
Full-text available
Many public controversies involve the assessment of statements about which we have imperfect information. Without a structured approach, it is quite difficult to develop an approach to reasoning which is not based on ad hoc choices. Forms of logic have been used in the past to try to bring such clarity, but these fail for a variety of reasons. We d...
Preprint
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Semantic spacetime is a model of configuration space, created within the framework of Promise Theory-a form of extended graph theory that embodies a strong form of locality and observer relativity, for discrete processes. These notes lay out the structure of semantic spacetime in a way that will hopefully shed light on related work. In conventional...
Book
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The concept of spacetime is limited and outdated ... here's how it can be generalized See also blog: http://markburgess.org/blog_spacetime19.html See on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1797773704/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=smart+space+time+burgess&qid=1551778123&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmrnull
Conference Paper
In 2038 we have lived though a decade during which the world's global computational infrastructure undermined privacy and trust in virtually every aspect of our lives. The problems were seen far in advance, but it was commonplace belief that a combination of cryptography and more distributed responsibilty in systems---'blockchains for everything, a...
Preprint
Full-text available
Consensus protocols can be an effective tool for synchronizing small amounts of data over small regions. We describe the concept and implementation of entangled links, applied to data transmission, using the framework of Promise Theory as a tool to help bring certainty to distributed consensus. Entanglement describes co-dependent evolution of state...
Article
Full-text available
In modern machine learning, pattern recognition replaces realtime semantic reasoning. The mapping from input to output is learned with fixed semantics by training outcomes deliberately. This is an expensive and static approach which depends heavily on the availability of a very particular kind of prior raining data to make inferences in a single st...
Article
Full-text available
Using the previously developed concepts of semantic spacetime, I explore the interpretation of knowledge representations, and their structure, as a semantic system, within the framework of promise theory. By assigning interpretations to phenomena, from observers to observed, we may approach a simple description of knowledge-based functional systems...
Chapter
Full-text available
Using the previously developed concepts of semantic spacetime, I explore the interpretation of knowledge representations, and their structure, as a semantic system, within the framework of promise theory. By assigning interpretations to phenomena, from observers to observed, we may approach a simple description of knowledge-based functional systems...
Article
The social ecosystem model provides an effective organizational blueprint for social media adoption. Because social media marketing is inherently advocacy-based, it depends on authentic, two-way interactions, peer recommendations, and earned media to succeed. Employees are empowered under a social ecosystem framework to engage across channels as au...
Working Paper
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Working Paper
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Article
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The study of spacetime, and its role in understanding functional systems has received little attention in information science. Recent work, on the origin of universal scaling in cities and biological systems, provides an intriguing insight into the functional use of space, and its measurable effects. Cities are large information systems, with many...
Working Paper
Full-text available
Article
Full-text available
The study of spacetime, and its role in understanding functional systems has received little attention in information science. Recent work, on the origin of universal scaling in cities and biological systems, provides an intriguing insight into the functional use of space, and its measurable effects. Cities are large information systems, with many...
Technical Report
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We summarize a multi-tenant and multiuser abstraction for ubiquitous distributed systems that range from datacentres to industrial, agricultural, and domestic scenarios. The virtual 'workspaces' we describe will be an important abstraction for managing multi-interest separation of concerns, both as a mapping between operations and resources, and as...
Research
Full-text available
Draft thoughts used for a Keynote at NOMS/BDIM 2008 in Brasil, written in 2007
Research
Full-text available
Using Promise Theory as a calculus, I review how to define agency in a scalable way, for the purpose of understanding semantic spacetimes. By following simple scaling rules, replacing individual agents with `super-agents' (sub-spaces), it is shown how agency can be scaled both dynamically and semantically. The notion of occupancy and tenancy, or h...
Article
Full-text available
Networking is undergoing a transformation throughout our industry. The need for scalable network control and automation shifts the focus from hardware driven products with ad hoc control to Software Defined Networks. This process is now well underway. In this paper, we adopt the perspective of the Promise Theory to examine the current and future st...
Article
Full-text available
Relationships between objects constitute our notion of space. When these relationships change we interpret this as the passage of time. Observer interpretations are essential to the way we understand these relationships. Hence observer semantics are an integral part of what we mean by spacetime. Semantics make up the essential difference in how one...
Article
Full-text available
Relationships between objects constitute our notion of space. When these relationships change we interpret this as the passage of time. Observer interpretations are essential to the way we understand these relationships. Hence observer semantics are an integral part of what we mean by spacetime. Semantics make up the essential difference in how one...
Article
Full-text available
Networking is undergoing a transformation throughout our industry. The need for scalable network control and automation shifts the focus from hardware driven products with ad hoc control to Software Defined Networks. This process is now well underway. In this paper, we adopt the perspective of the Promise Theory to examine the current and future st...
Article
Full-text available
Promises, impositions, proposals, predictions, and suggestions are categorized as voluntary co-operational methods. The class of voluntary co-operational methods is included in the class of so-called directionals. Directionals are mechanisms supporting the mutual coordination of autonomous agents. Notations are provided capable of expressing residu...
Article
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In system operations the term rollback is often used to imply that arbitrary changes can be reversed i.e. ‘rolled back’ from an erroneous state to a previously known acceptable state. We show that this assumption is flawed and discuss error-correction schemes based on absolute rather than relative change.Insight may be gained by relating change man...
Article
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Models of determinism are changing IT management.
Article
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The methods of system administration have changed little in the past 20 years. While core IT technologies have improved in a multitude of ways, for many if not most organizations system administration is still based on production-line build logistics (aka provisioning) and reactive incident handling. As we progress into an information age, humans w...
Article
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We study the properties of the principal eigenvector for the adjacency matrix (and related matrices) for a general directed graph. In particular—motivated by the use of the eigenvector for estimating the “importance” of the nodes in the graph—we focus on the distribution of positive weight in this eigenvector, and give a coherent picture which buil...
Conference Paper
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We present a method for aiding humans in understanding causal relationships between entities in complex systems via a simplified calculus of facts and rules. Facts are human-readable subject-verb-object statements about system entities, interpreted as (entity-relationship-entity) triples. Rules construct new facts via implication and “weak transiti...
Article
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In troubleshooting a complex system, hidden depen-dencies manifest in unexpected ways. We present a methodology for uncovering dependencies between behavior and configuration by exploiting what we call "weak transitive relationships" in the architecture of a system. The user specifies known architectural re-lationships between components, plus a se...
Article
Full-text available
We use the notion of a promise to define local trust between agents possessing autonomous decision-making. An agent is trustworthy if it is expected that it will keep a promise. This definition satisfies most commonplace meanings of trust. Reputation is then an estimation of this expectation value that is passed on from agent to agent. Our definiti...
Article
Foreword Part I. Fields: 1. Introduction 2. The electromagnetic field 3. Field parameters 4. The action principle 5. Classical field dynamics 6. Statistical interpretation of the field 7. Examples and applications Part II. Groups and Fields: 8. Field transformations 9. Spacetime transformations 10. Kinematical and dynamical transformations 11. Posi...
Conference Paper
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We present a resource management algorithm based upon guided “walks” within a system state space. Walks are guided via simple predictions of optimum behavior whose accuracy increases as system state approaches a predicted optimum. Optimum behavior is defined as maximizing payoff, which is the difference between value of provided service and cost of...
Conference Paper
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Ontological modelling for machine inference has featured prominently in IT management research recently, but there is more immediate scope for knowledge modelling in the realm of human inference. This work discusses the relationship between ISO Standard Topic Maps and Promise Theory and shows how these two knowledge models models complement one ano...
Patent
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A method, device, and computer program product for ranking documents using link analysis, with remedies for sinks, including forming a metagraph from an original graph containing a link and a node; and one of reversing a link in the metagraph, and pumping a source in the metagraph.
Chapter
The system administrator plays the role of a service provider and of a maintenance agent. In a world of increasing reliance on computing systems, the engineers who design, tune and maintain the system are the keys to its success. The administration of systems and business process are clearly related, at an intimate level. The goals of the two are c...
Article
In this chapter, a mixed strategy of rationality and causality is presented, which enables system administrators to formalize problems of planning and management, through a variety of methods. These methods make contact with diverse fields of research. Science, or natural philosophy, is the discourse between observation and rational approximation....
Article
This chapter traces the role of data centers in services. rather than managing computer resources in small private rooms, many companies and organizations are once again consolidating the management of systems into specialized data centers. Such organized management is linked to the rise of de facto standards like ITIL and to the increased use of o...
Chapter
In computer programming, one does not normally take into account the random arrival of input, or the interactions between independent tasks which share common resources. These are matters that are of central importance in system administration. There are many measures one might use to discuss the complexity of a solution to a problem: the number of...
Article
In this article we address the application component placement (ACP) problem for a data center. The problem is defined as follows: for a given topology of a network consisting of switches, servers and storage devices with varying capabilities, and for ...