Paolo Dini

U of Hertfordshire, LSE · Computer Science, Media & Communications

We define sustainable development to involve socioeconomic activity that is compatible with environmental sustainability principles, economic resilience at all scales of the economy, democratic processes and institutions, and social solidarity principles. This is a speculative paper whose main claim is that unless the medium of exchange is redesign...

The paper builds on prior work that highlights the opportunity to address the late payment problem in B2B networks by set-off of mutual debts, in the bilateral case, or of the smallest invoice amount in closed cycles of obligations with three or more nodes. The present work introduces generalizations of the model to account for the settlement of an...

The main aim of this report is to provide an introductory tutorial on the Abstract State Machines (ASM) specification method for software engineering to an audience already familiar with the Temporal Logic of Actions (TLA+) method. The report asks to what extent the ASM and TLA+ methods are complementary in checking specifications against stated re...

The increasingly complex economic and financial environment in which we live makes the management of liquidity in payment systems and the economy in general a persistent challenge. New technologies make it possible to address this challenge through alternative solutions that complement and strengthen existing payment systems. For example, interbank...

The increasingly complex economic and financial environment in which we live makes the management of liquidity in payment systems and the economy in general a persistent challenge. New technologies make it possible to address this challenge through alternative solutions that complement and strengthen existing payment systems. For example, interbank...

This is the second of a series of reports that will be published addressing selected topics in accordance with the European Commission priorities. The aim is to reflect on the latest trends and developments and discuss the future of blockchain in Europe and globally. This report, prepared by the new team leading the EU Blockchain Observatory and F...

Financial crisis’ is sometimes regarded as synonymous with `economic crisis’, but this is an oversimplification and risks missing the feedback loops between the financial and real economies. In this paper, the role of money is revisited in the context of distinguishing the real economy from the financial economy. A theoretical framework is develope...

Cover of the magazine displaying the graphic from the article. All multilateral set-off cycles in a month.

During financial crises, liquidity tends to become scarce, a problem that disproportionately affects small companies. This paper shows that obligation-clearing is a very effective liquidity-saving method for providing relief in the trade credit market and, therefore, on the supply-side or productive part of the economy. The paper also demonstrates...

During financial crises, liquidity tends to become scarce, a problem that disproportionately affects small companies. This paper shows that obligation-clearing is a very effective liquidity-saving method for providing relief in the trade credit market and, therefore, on the supply-side or productive part of the economy. The paper also demonstrates...

The increasingly complex economic and financial environment in which we live makes the management of liquidity in payment systems and the economy in general a persistent challenge. New technologies are making it possible to address this challenge through alternative solutions that complement and strengthen existing payment systems. For example, the...

This paper addresses the question whether complementary currencies can help us think and practice politics in new and different ways which contribute to democratic change and civic empowerment in our times. The space created by the Sardex complementary currency circuit in Sardinia (2009-to date) seems to leave enough room for the emergence of a col...

Reading in parallel the description of community networks and community currencies reveals many similarities and differences between these two models of self-organisation around networking infrastructures and monetary systems, respectively. This chapter brings together experts from both domains in an effort to share knowledge and experience, using...

This chapter provides a summary of the results of the BIOMICS project¹, specifically from the point of view of the development of a mathematical framework that can support a productive collaboration between cell biochemistry, dynamical systems, algebraic automata theory, and specification languages, leading to a theory of Interaction Computing (IC)...

Unconventional computation emerged as a response to a series of technological and societal challenges. The main source of these challenges is the expected collapse of Moore’s law. It is very likely that the existing trend of building faster digital information processing machines will come to an end. This chapter provides a broad philosophical disc...

Sardex is a B2B electronic complementary currency and mutual credit system. It allows private funding to be endogenously generated within a geographically limited socio-economic context, rather than injected from exogenous sources, leading to a greater level of positive social impact. Sardex promotes stable and constructive integration of market ac...

The paper develops a Petri net model of a negative feedback oscillator, Case 2a from Tyson et al. (Curr. Opin. Cell Biol. 15, 221–231, (2003), [48]), in order to be able to perform the holonomy decomposition of the automaton derived from its token markings and allowed transitions for a given initial state. The objective is to investigate the algebr...

Sardex is an electronic B2B mutual credit system that has been operating on the island of Sardinia since 2009 as a complementary currency. In contrast to other funding mechanisms, it allows private funding driving social and environmental impact to be endogenously generated within a given geographically limited socio-economic context, rather than i...

Based on empirical data, this study discusses the introduction, acceptance and circulation of two complementary currencies in Argentina that do not fit well in the main approaches to the nature of money. These two monetary circuits, provincial and community currencies, were introduced as units of account to denominate the value of debt and circulat...

The emergence of peer‐to‐peer (P2P) networking shows that technological determinism can be turned on its head: rather than socio‐economic systems being determined by technological developments, sometimes technology can be determined by its users. Although in general the coupling goes both ways, P2P networking culminates the progression in computer...

The emergence of peer‐to‐peer (P2P) networking shows that technological determinism can be turned on its head: rather than socio‐economic systems being determined by technological developments, sometimes technology can be determined by its users. Although in general the coupling goes both ways, P2P networking culminates the progression in computer...

Interaction computing is inspired by the observation that cell metabolic/regulatory systems construct order dynamically, through constrained interactions between their components and based on a wide range of possible inputs and environmental conditions. The goals of this work are to (i) identify and understand mathematically the natural subsystems...

This paper is motivated by a long-standing curiosity about the role of scale in explanatory theories of socio-economic action. Introducing scale as an analytical variable implies the coexistence of individuals alongside institutions. We make the case that economic activity becomes more sustainable when it is 'colonized' by 'social value' whereby ma...

A methodology for the self-assessment of the socio-economic impact of Software-as-a-Service and Internet of Services research projects is presented in the context of EU-funded research. The SEQUOIA methodology was developed by assessing thirty existing projects with their close collaboration. This process was documented to provide a basis for futur...

The main objective of this report is to begin the difficult task of relating the dynamical characteristics of cellular pathways of systems biology to the computational characteristics of automata derived from their discretization. The fundamental hypothesis of BIOMICS is that the former are best understood through the symmetry properties of their d...

This paper is structured as an informal dialogue between two members of the EINS (www.internet-science.eu) Network of Excellence: a sociologist (Laura Sartori) and an engineer (Paolo Dini). The deck is stacked since the engineer also taught physics for a number of years, has been studying social and economic theory for the past 10 years, and is als...

In the context of the stability analysis of interdependent networks through the eigenvalue evaluation of their adjacency matrices, we characterize algebraically and also geometrically necessary and sufficient conditions for the adjacency matrices of directed and undirected graphs to commute. We also discuss the problem of communicating the concepts...

In this extended abstract we discuss the infrastructure of the Internet as two distinct layers that are increasingly interdependent : the network layer, below, and the Web, above. The network layer is responsible for the structural properties of the Internet, while the top layer is where the Web content is consumed through Web applications and comm...

Interaction Computing (IC) aims to map the properties of integrable low-dimensional non-linear dynamical systems to the discrete domain of finite-state automata in an attempt to reproduce in software the self-organizing and dynamically stable properties of sub-cellular biochemical systems. As the work reported in this paper is still at the early st...

The OPENLAWS.eu project aims to linking existing laws, cases and legal literature throughout the EU and member states and potentially worldwide and at adding new user-friendly functionality for a higher productivity. Furthermore, the project should make it possible to easily publish new legal content in order to make law more transparent and unders...

We analyse two very simple Petri nets inspired by the Oregonator model of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction using our stochastic Petri net simulator. We then perform the Krohn-Rhodes holonomy decomposition of the automata derived from the Petri nets. The simplest case shows that the automaton can be expressed as a cascade of permutation-reset cycli...

This article examines the 2007 banking crisis from an interdisciplinary and, in particular, social constructivist perspective to identify its structural and systemic causes. After presenting and explaining a wide meta-theoretical framework that can accommodate different understandings of socio-economic action, it argues that some of the scale-invar...

This paper reflects critically on challenges and opportunities associated with developing a theoretical framework for an interdisciplinary Framework Programme 7 research project funded by the European Commission in the area of digital ecosystems. The paper first provides a description of the interdisciplinary structure of the research agenda of the...

A key challenge in modern computing is to develop systems that address complex, dynamic problems in a scalable and efficient way, because the increasing complexity of software makes designing and maintaining efficient and flexible systems increasingly difficult. Biological systems are thought to possess robust, scalable processing paradigms that ca...

The informal notion of constructive dynamical space, inspired by biochemical systems, gives the perspective from which a transformation semigroup can be considered as a programming language. This perspective complements a longer-term mathematical investigation into different understandings of the nature of computation that we see as fundamentally i...

This paper presents a symmetry analysis based on Lie groups of a system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) modelling the p53-mdm2 regulatory pathway. This pathway is being investigated across several research groups as a biological system from which to extract dynamical and algebraic characteristics relevant to the emerging concept of Intera...

This paper lays out an interdisciplinary research framework that integrates perspectives from physics, biology, mathematics, and computer science to develop a vision of interaction computing. The paper recounts the main insights and lessons learned in the past six years across multiple projects, gives a current definition of the problem, and outli...

This article presents current research work on the development of BEBS (BIONETS Economic and Business Simulation Model). This model is used to illustrate how in pervasive agent-based networks dynamic agents engage in distributed mobile communication exchanges that carry a potential, non-quantified value to be determined. This value can be monetise...

Evolutionary computing in general and distributed online evolutionary computation in particular are hard problems in terms of monitoring, evaluation, generating functionality, and performance. We strive to complement current approaches and develop mechanisms which do not require the ex post effort of controlling the outcome of the computation. Inst...

The concept of ecosystem is about to be brought into the digital age where, instead of plants and animals, the digital species who roam the landscape include software components, applications, services, business models, contractual frameworks and laws. Along with understanding the nature of habitat and the significance of localisation, diversity is...

The emergence of peer‐to‐peer (P2P) networking shows that technological determinism can be turned on its head: rather than socio‐economic systems being determined by technological developments, sometimes technology can be determined by its users. Although in general the coupling goes both ways, P2P networking culminates the progression in computer...

This paper begins to chart and critically analyse the formal connections between algebra, logic, and cell biology on the one hand, and algebra, logic, and software security on the other. Much of the discussion is necessarily conceptual. Where the discussion is more formal the current distance between these disciplines appears evident. The paper foc...

This paper shows the early results of new research on how Digital Ecosystems can promote new modes of sustainable e-business practices, for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs), using an open architecture for content sharing and Business-to-Business (B2B) interactions in the knowledge economy, and within a framework of open standards. The curr...

In this talk I will attempt to give an overview of the emerging field of Digital Ecosystems research. I will outline some of the significant events and conceptual turning points of the past few years, the current activities, and the future challenges. In all cases my comments will be divided into two parts: the first part focuses on digital ecosyst...

An autonomic network must work unsupervised, therefore must be able to respond to unpredictable situations. The BIONETS project is working towards resilient network services that are able not only to perform short-term adapta- tions to the environment but also long-term evolution of new functionalities. To this end, a bio-inspired approach is pro-...

In this paper we present ideas and architectural principles upon which we are basing the development of a distributed, open-source infrastructure that, in turn, will support the expression of business models, the dynamic composition of software services, and the optimisation of service chains through automatic self-organising and evolutionary algor...

We present algebraic machinery to analyze one-dimensional inelastic collapse in which the collision sequence is periodic. Given a periodic sequence of collisions, this machinery determines those values of the coefficient of restitution for which the given sequence is observable. As an illustration of the technique, we find a previously unobserved i...

A semi-empirical laminar separation bubble model has been developed and incorporated into an airfoil design and analysis program. The generality and efficiency of this model have been achieved by approximating the local viscous/inviscid interaction, the transition location, and the turbulent reattachment process within the framework of an integral...

An existing transition prediction method for attached, two-dimensional, incompressible boundary layers based on linear stability analysis is extended to separated, two-dimensional, incompressible boundary layers such as those found in laminar (transitional) separation bubbles. It is shown why the present method, which tracks the growth of disturban...

In predicting the aerodynamic characteristics of airfoils operating at low Reynolds numbers, it is often important to account for the effects of laminar (transitional) separation bubbles. Previous approaches to the modelling of this viscous phenomenon range from fast but sometimes unreliable empirical correlations for the length of the bubble and t...

A laminar separation bubble model has been developed which approximates the viscous/inviscid interaction in the bubble region. An implicit transition criterion allows the accurate prediction of the bubble length and of the shear layer growth along the bubble. Recent insights into the bubble flow field have uncovered the need to modify existing turb...

In order to predict the aerodynamic characteristics of airfoils operating at low Reynolds numbers, it is necessary to accurately account for the effects of laminar (transitional) separation bubbles. Generally, the greatest difficulty comes about when attempting to determine the increase in profile drag that results from the presence of separation b...

The WAND (Wireless Ad hoc Network for Dublin) project represents an attempt to understand how new ICT, Information and Communication Technologies, and applications can be optimised according to the socio-economic and cultural characteristics of the local area in which they are introduced. The idea is to use social research methods during the innova...

This paper is the first step in an exploration of the mathematical modelling of autopoiesis, using Robert Rosen's M -R system as a central reference point. Category theory is introduced only informally in order to render the material more accessible to a wider audience. Rather than break-ing any new ground in terms of mathematical results the paper...

As part of the construction of a Europe-wide Digital Business Ecosystem, in this paper we begin to ask several questions about how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), their business processes, and the services they rely upon can be modelled. For the purposes of this paper we focus more on the subset of SMEs that can be loosely described as s...

This paper provides a summary of past outputs and current activities of social science research on Digital Ecosystems within the context of EU-funded research. We discuss briefly some of the theoretical assumptions and objectives, summarise the main outputs and current activities of the DBE and OPAALS projects, and present a discussion of our curre...

Thesis (M.S.)--Pennsylvania State University. Library holds archival microfiches negative and service copy,