Tomas Veloz

Tomas Veloz
Metropolitan University of Technology · Matematicas

Doctor of Philosophy
Foundations of Interdisciplinary Mathematical Modelling: researcher, consultant, entrepreneur

About

86
Publications
11,334
Reads
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858
Citations
Introduction
Interdisciplinary scientist with background in physics, mathematics and computer science. I generally engage in interdisciplinary projects and help to identify mathematical structures, or formal languages, to better represent or analyze the problems at stake. **Mathematical frameworks:** Logics (Propositional, Modal, Fuzzy, etc.) Dynamical Systems Complexity theory Quantum Structures Agent Based modeling Networks Reaction Networks (Petri Nets) **Areas of interest** Cognitive science Artificial intellience Synthetic Biology Ecological systems and others. Founder of the foundation for the interdisciplinary development of science, thechology and arts (DICTA). Amateur guitar player at little symphonic duet.
Additional affiliations
December 2020 - present
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Position
  • Senior Researcher
Description
  • Director of mathematical modelling Head of the Systemic Modelling and Applications group
March 2017 - present
Instituto de Filosofía y Ciencias de la Complejidad
Instituto de Filosofía y Ciencias de la Complejidad
Position
  • PostDoc Position
January 2016 - March 2017
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Position
  • PostDoc Position
Education
March 2011 - December 2015
University of British Columbia
Field of study
  • Interdisciplinary studies
March 2008 - December 2010
University of Chile
Field of study
  • Computer Science
March 2006 - December 2007
University of Chile
Field of study
  • Mathematics

Publications

Publications (86)
Article
Full-text available
This paper summarizes and reviews Chemical Organization Theory (COT), a formalism for the analysis of complex, self-organizing systems across multiple disciplines. Its elements are resources and reactions. A reaction maps a set of resources onto another set, thus representing an elementary process that transforms resources into new resources. React...
Poster
Full-text available
The field of AI and the noosphere share a common interest in intelligence. The central paradigm in the current AI field is that once intelligent systems become advanced enough, they will solve our problems and society will benefit from these intelligent technologies. However, many of the current problems we face, such as the climate crisis, have be...
Chapter
Since the seminal paper by Tversky and Kahneman, the ‘conjunction fallacy’ has been the subject of multiple debates and become a fundamental challenge for cognitive theories in decision-making. In this chapter, we take a rather uncommon perspective on this phenomenon. Instead of trying to explain the nature or causes of the conjunction fallacy (int...
Article
Full-text available
Immersive learning environments in education provide a set of rich and diverse learning affordances (possibilities). Cognition in such environments can be considered as embodied, enacted, embedded, and extended (the 4Es of cognition). During such cognitive happenings, we assume and live as valid everything we experience. Yet in this enactive struct...
Article
Full-text available
Context: The 4E approach proposes an alternative framework for understanding cognition and learning. However, its application to the study of education in the 21st century is incipient. Problem: What are the challenges of 21st-century education in the field of cognition and learning? How can the 4E approach be implemented in educational processes?...
Article
Full-text available
Context: The 4E approach proposes an alternative framework to understanding cognition and learning. However, its application to the study of creativity from new educational approaches such as STEAM is incipient. Problem: How can the 4E approach that fosters creativity be implemented in STEAM education, through participation in technology-mediated l...
Article
Full-text available
We address the following three questions that summarize the concerns of commentators: (a) Is the metaphor of creativity as catching the big fish useful? (b) What is the relationship between radical constructivism and the 4E approach? (c) What do we understand by teaching from the 4E approach?
Article
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Understanding the underlying structure of evolutionary processes is one the most important issues of scientific enquiry of this century [...]
Article
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The emergence and evolution of worldviews is a complex phenomenon that requires strong and rigorous scientific attention in our hyperconnected world. On the one hand, cognitive theories have proposed reasonable frameworks but have not reached general modeling frameworks where predictions can be tested. On the other hand, machine-learning-based appl...
Article
Full-text available
Reaction network is a promising framework for representing complex systems of diverse and even interdisciplinary types. In this approach, complex systems appear as self-maintaining structures emerging from a multitude of interactions, similar to proposed scenarios for the origin of life out of autocatalytic networks. The formalism of chemical organ...
Article
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While the phenomena of reaching a goal is generally represented in the framework of optimization, the phenomena of becoming of a goal is more similar to a “self-organization and emergent” rather than an “optimization and preexisting” process. In this article we provide a modeling framework for the former alternative by representing goals as emergen...
Article
Full-text available
STEM and STEAM education promotes the integration between science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and the arts. The latter aims at favoring deep and collaborative learning on students, through curricular integration in K-12 science education. The enactive and ecological psychology approach to education puts attention on the role of the teach...
Article
Full-text available
In this article, we attempt at developing a scenario for the self-organization of goal-directed systems out of networks of (chemical) reactions. Related scenarios have been proposed to explain the origin of life starting from autocatalytic sets, but these sets tend to be too unstable and dependent on their environment to maintain. We apply instead...
Article
Full-text available
Endosymbiosis is a type of symbiosis where one species of microscopic scale inhabits the cell of another species of a larger scale, such that the exchange of metabolic byproducts produces mutual benefit. These benefits can occur at different biological levels. For example, endosymbiosis promotes efficiency of the cell metabolism, cell replication,...
Article
Full-text available
We present the fundamentals of the quantum theoretical approach we have developed in the last decade to model cognitive phenomena that resisted modeling by means of classical logical and probabilistic structures, like Boolean, Kolmogorovian and, more generally, set theoretical structures. We firstly sketch the operational-realistic foundations of c...
Article
Full-text available
Endosymbiosis is a type of symbiosis where one species inhabits another species, and both are benefited. It is not trivial to develop models of endosymbiosis because the interaction might involve complex mechanisms, consisting of various steps, and occurring at different levels of the organisms activity. Reaction networks can be applied to model co...
Article
The Gaia hypothesis states that the Earth is an instance of life. However, appraisals of it tend to focus on the claim that life is a feedback self-regulator that controls Earth's chemistry and climate dynamics, yet, self-regulation by feedbacks is not a definitive characteristic of living systems. Here, we consider the characterization of biologic...
Preprint
Full-text available
Measures to reduce the impact of COVID19 require a mix of logistic, political and social capacity. Depending on the country, different capacities to increase of hospitalization or to properly apply lockdowns are observed. In order to better understand the impact of these measures we have developed a compartmental model which, on the one hand allows...
Preprint
Full-text available
Measures to reduce the impact of COVID19 require a mix of logistic, political and social capacity. Depending on the country, different capacities to increase of hospitalization or to properly apply lockdowns are observed. In order to better understand the impact of these measures we have developed a compartmental model which, on the one hand allows...
Article
Full-text available
How can we explain the strange behavior of quantum and relativistic entities? Why do they behave in ways that defy our intuition about how physical entities should behave, considering our ordinary experience of the world around us? In this article, we address these questions by showing that the comportment of quantum and relativistic entities is no...
Article
Full-text available
We present a novel approach to represent ecological systems using reaction networks, and show how a particular framework called chemical organization theory (COT) sheds new light on the longstanding complexity–stability debate. Namely, COT provides a novel conceptual landscape plenty of analytic tools to explore the interplay between structure and...
Preprint
We present a novel approach to represent ecological systems using reaction networks, and show how a particular framework called Chemical Organization Theory (COT) sheds new light on the longstanding complexity-stability debate. Namely, COT provides a novel conceptual landscape plenty of analytic tools to explore the interplay between structure and...
Chapter
Full-text available
Conference Worlds of Entanglement 2019 in Santiago, Chile. Most of the abstracts were later published in a special issue in th journal foundations of Science
Article
Full-text available
We provide a general description of the phenomenon of entanglement in bipartite systems, as it manifests in micro and macro physical systems, as well as in human cognitive processes. We do so by observing that when genuine coincidence measurements are considered, the violation of the ‘marginal laws’, in addition to the Bell-CHSH inequality, is also...
Preprint
Conceptual entanglement is a crucial phenomenon in quantum cognition because it implies that classical probabilities cannot model non--compositional conceptual phenomena. While several psychological experiments have been developed to test conceptual entanglement, this has not been explored in the context of Natural Language Processing. In this pape...
Chapter
We show that the Brussels operational-realistic approach to quantum physics and quantum cognition offers a fundamental strategy for modeling the meaning associated with collections of documental entities. To do so, we take the World Wide Web as a paradigmatic example and emphasize the importance of distinguishing the Web, made of printed documents,...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Digital learning technologies have proven to enhance learning outcomes across educational sectors and contexts (Cook & Santos, 2016). Yet critical challenges remain, notably: minimising the decay of digital interventions over time (Hennessy et al., 2019); and achieving widespread learning outcomes in diverse and multicultural audiences (Dunn & Mari...
Article
Full-text available
We motivate the possibility of using notions and methods derived from quantum physics, and more specifically from the research field known as ‘quantum cognition’, to optimally model different situations in the field of medicine, its decision-making processes and ensuing practices, particularly in relation to chronic and rare diseases. This also as...
Chapter
It is well known that closure is a necessary topological property for a reaction network to be dynamically stable. In this work we combine notions of chemical organization theory with structural properties of reaction networks to distill a minimal set of closed reaction networks that encodes the non-trivial stable dynamical regimes of the network....
Article
Full-text available
Since its inception, many physicists have seen in quantum mechanics the possibility, if not the necessity, of bringing cognitive aspects into the play, which were instead absent, or unnoticed, in the previous classical theories. In this article, we outline the path that led us to support the hypothesis that our physical reality is fundamentally con...
Preprint
Full-text available
We provide a general description of the phenomenon of entanglement in bipartite systems, as it manifests in micro and macro physical systems, as well as in human cognitive processes. We do so by observing that when genuine coincidence measurements are considered, the violation of the 'marginal laws', in addition to the Bell-CHSH inequality, is also...
Preprint
Full-text available
Today’s mobile learning technologies, such as smartphones and tablets, and their digital affordances (possibilities), have a key role to play in the transformative potential of educational practice. However such process is embedded within an inherent and unpredictable complexity, not only in the design and development of educational experiences bas...
Article
Full-text available
Groenewold-Van Hove theorem suggest that is not always possible to transform classical observables into quantum observables (a process known as quantization) in a way that, for all Hamiltonians, the constants of motion are preserved. The latter is a strong shortcoming for the ultimate goal of quantization, as one would expect that the notion of “co...
Preprint
Full-text available
We motivate the possibility of using notions and methods derived from quantum physics, and more specifically from the research field known as 'quantum cognition', to optimally model different situations in the field of medicine, its decision-making processes and ensuing practices, particularly in relation to chronic and rare diseases. This also as...
Preprint
Full-text available
We show that the Brussels operational-realistic approach to quantum physics and quantum cognition offers a fundamental strategy for modeling the meaning associated with collections of documental entities. To do so, we take the World Wide Web as a paradigmatic example and emphasize the importance of distinguishing the Web, made of printed documents,...
Preprint
We present the fundamentals of the quantum theoretical approach we have developed in the last decade to model cognitive phenomena that resisted modeling by means of classical logical and probabilistic structures, like Boolean, Kolmogorovian and, more generally, set theoretical structures. We firstly sketch the operational-realistic foundations of c...
Article
Full-text available
In the first half of this two-part article, we analyzed a cognitive psychology experiment where participants were asked to select pairs of directions that they considered to be the best example of 'Two Different Wind Directions', and showed that the data violate the CHSH version of Bell's inequality, with same magnitude as in typical Bell-test expe...
Preprint
Full-text available
Since its inception, many physicists have seen in quantum mechanics the possibility, if not the necessity, of bringing cognitive aspects into the play, which were instead absent, or unnoticed, in the previous classical theories. In this article, we outline the path that led us to support the hypothesis that our physical reality is fundamentally con...
Article
Full-text available
In psychological measurements, two levels should be distinguished: the 'individual level', relative to the different participants in a given cognitive situation, and the 'collective level', relative to the overall statistics of their outcomes, which we propose to associate with a notion of 'collective participant'. When the distinction between thes...
Article
Full-text available
The ‘conjunction fallacy’ has been extensively debated by scholars in cognitive science and, in recent times, the discussion has been enriched by the proposal of modeling the fallacy using the quantum formalism. Two major quantum approaches have been put forward: the first assumes that respondents use a two-step sequential reasoning and that the fa...
Article
Full-text available
La educación continua involucra actividades de aprendizaje que se generalmente se realizan después de la formación tradicionalmente reglada. Una creciente oferta educativa se ha extendido en todo el mundo en forma de cursos, diplomados, postítulos y otros tipos de programas de estudio. Pese a la creciente importancia y oferta de programas de educac...
Preprint
How can we explain the strange behavior of quantum and relativistic entities? Why do they behave in ways that defy our intuition about how physical entities should behave, considering our ordinary experience of the world around us? In this article, we address these questions by showing that the comportment of quantum and relativistic entities is no...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Abstracts of conference Worlds of Entanglement at the Centre Leo Apostel in Oct 27-29, 2017.
Preprint
In the first half of this two-part article, we analyzed a cognitive psychology experiment where participants were asked to select pairs of directions that they considered to be the best example of 'Two Different Wind Directions', and showed that the data violate the CHSH version of Bell's inequality, with same magnitude as in typical Bell-test expe...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The mathematical formalism of quantum theory exhibits significant effectiveness when applied to cognitive phenomena that have resisted traditional (set theoretical) modeling. Relying on a decade of research on the operational foundations of micro-physical and conceptual entities, we present a theoretical framework for the representation of concepts...
Article
Full-text available
Reaction Networks have been recently proposed as a framework for systems modeling due to its capability to describe many entities interacting in contextual ways and leading to the emergence of meta-structures. Since systems can be subjected to structural changes that not only alter their inner functioning, but also their underlying ontological feat...
Article
Full-text available
We elaborate a quantum model for corpora of written documents, like the pages forming the World Wide Web. To that end, we are guided by how physicists constructed quantum theory for microscopic entities, which unlike classical objects cannot be fully represented in our spatial theater. We suggest that a similar construction needs to be carried out...
Preprint
We elaborate a quantum model for the meaning associated with corpora of written documents, like the pages forming the World Wide Web. To that end, we are guided by how physicists constructed quantum theory for microscopic entities, which unlike classical objects cannot be fully represented in our spatial theater. We suggest that a similar construct...
Article
Full-text available
Quantum cognition is an emergent area of research that applies quantum structures in cognitive situations where traditional approaches are problematic. Independently from quantum cognition, quantum approaches for the semantics of music interpretation and improvisation have been proposed in the context of quantum computational logic and standard qua...
Article
Full-text available
The basic processes that bring about living systems are conventionally represented in the framework of chemical reaction networks. Recently, it has been proposed that this framework can be exploited for studying various other phenomena. Reaction networks are specially suited for representing situations where different types of entities interact in...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The ‘quantum cognition’ paradigm was recently challenged by its proven impossibility to simultaneously model ‘question order effects’ and ‘response replicability’. In the present article we describe sequential dichotomic measurements within an operational and realistic framework for human cognition, and represent them in a quantum-like ‘extended Bl...
Article
Full-text available
The mathematical formalism of quantum theory exhibits significant effectiveness when applied to cognitive phenomena that have resisted traditional (set theoretical) modeling. Relying on a decade of research on the operational foundations of micro-physical and conceptual entities, we present a theoretical framework for the representation of concepts...
Article
The formalism of quantum theory in Hilbert space has been applied with success to the modeling and explanation of several cognitive phenomena, whereas traditional cognitive approaches were problematical. However, this 'quantum cognition paradigm' was recently challenged by its proven impossibility to simultaneously model 'question order effects' an...
Article
The research on human cognition has recently benefited from the use of the mathematical formalism of quantum theory in Hilbert space. However, cognitive situations exist which indicate that the Hilbert space structure, and the associated Born rule, would be insufficient to provide a satisfactory modeling of the collected data, so that one needs to...
Article
Full-text available
We recently performed cognitive experiments on conjunctions and negations of two concepts with the aim of investigating the combination problem of concepts. Our experiments confirmed the deviations (conceptual vagueness, underextension, overextension, etc.) from the rules of classical (fuzzy) logic and probability theory observed by several scholar...
Article
Full-text available
Quantum models of concept combinations have been successful in representing various experimental situations that cannot be accommodated by traditional models based on classical probability or fuzzy set theory. In many cases, the focus has been on producing a representation that fits experimental results to validate quantum models. However, these re...
Article
Full-text available
We analyze in this paper the data collected in a set of experiments investigating how people combine natural concepts. We study the mutual influence of conceptual conjunction and negation by measuring the membership weights of a list of exemplars with respect to two concepts, e.g., Fruits and Vegetables, and their conjunction Fruits And Vegetables,...
Article
We study the solution of a class of PDE with piecewise constant argument of generalized type. Separation of variables leads to a solution formed by a series of products. In previous works, the convergence and bounds of the solution could be obtained from the study of the solution on the first constancy interval only. In the general case however, ea...
Article
Traditional cognitive science rests on a foundation of classical logic and probability theory. This foundation has been seriously challenged by several findings in experimental psychology on human decision making. Meanwhile, the formalism of quantum theory has provided an efficient resource for modeling these classically problematical situations. I...
Article
Full-text available
Increasing experimental evidence shows that humans combine concepts in a way that violates the rules of classical logic and probability theory. On the other hand, mathematical models inspired by the formalism of quantum theory are in accordance with data on concepts and their combinations. In this paper, we investigate a novel type of concept combi...
Article
Full-text available
Motivation: The functioning of many biological processes depends on the appearance of only a small number of a single molecular species. Additionally, the observation of molecular crowding leads to the insight that even a high number of copies of species do not guarantee their interaction. How single particles contribute to stabilizing biological s...
Conference Paper
Conceptual entanglement is a crucial phenomenon in quantum cognition because it implies that classical probabilities cannot model non-compositional conceptual phenomena. While several psychological experiments have been developed to test conceptual entanglement, this has not been explored in the context of Natural Language Processing. In this paper...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The quantum inspired State Context Property (SCOP) theory of concepts is unique amongst theories of concepts in offering a means of incorporating that for each concept in each different context there are an unlimited number of exemplars, or states, of varying degrees of typicality. Working with data from a study in which participants were asked to...
Article
Full-text available
The application of conventional phylogenetic techniques for inferring cultural history is problematic due to differences in the nature of information transmission in biological and cultural realms. In culture, units of transmission are not just measurable attributes, but communicable concepts. Therefore, relatedness amongst cultural elements often...
Article
Full-text available
The paper uses the SCOP theory of concepts to model the role of environmental context on three levels of entrepreneurial opportunity: idea generation, idea development, and entrepreneurial decision. The role of contextual-fit in the generation and development of ideas is modeled as the collapse of their superposition state into one of the potential...
Article
Full-text available
The application of phylogenetic techniques to the documentation of cultural history can present a distorted picture due to horizontal transmission and blending. Moreover, the units of cultural transmission must be communicable concepts, rather than conveniently measurable attributes, and relatedness between elements of culture often resides at the...
Article
Full-text available
The mathematical formalism of quantum theory has been successfully used in human cognition to model decision processes and to deliver representations of human knowledge. As such, quantum cognition inspired tools have improved technologies for Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval. In this paper, we overview the quantum cognition app...
Preprint
In recent years, quantum-based methods have promisingly integrated the traditional procedures in information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP). Inspired by our research on the identification and application of quantum structures in cognition, more specifically our work on the representation of concepts and their combinations, we...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In recent years, quantum-based methods have promisingly integrated the traditional procedures in information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP). Inspired by our research on the identification and application of quantum structures in cognition, more specifically our work on the representation of concepts and their combinations, we...
Article
Full-text available
The powerful mathematical tools developed for the study of large scale reaction networks have given rise to applications of this framework beyond the scope of biochemistry. Recently, reaction networks have been suggested as an alternative way to model social phenomena. In this "socio-chemical metaphor" molecular species play the role of agents' dec...
Article
Full-text available
Cycles are abundant in most kinds of networks, especially in biological ones. Here, we investigate their role in the evolution of a chemical reaction system from one self-sustaining composition of molecular species to another and their influence on the stability of these compositions. While it is accepted that, from a topological standpoint, they e...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
People use conjunctions and disjunctions of concepts in ways that violate the rules of classical logic, such as the law of compositionality. Specifically, they overextend conjunctions of concepts, a phenomenon referred to as the Guppy Effect. We build on previous efforts to develop a quantum model that explains the Guppy Effect in terms of interfer...
Article
Full-text available
The application of conventional phylogenetic techniques for inferring cultural history is problematic due to differences in the nature of information transmission in biological and cultural realms. In culture, units of transmission are not just measurable attributes, but communicable concepts. Therefore, relatedness amongst cultural elements often...
Article
Full-text available
Experiments in cognitive science and decision theory show that the ways in which people combine concepts and make decisions cannot be described by classical logic and probability theory. This has serious implications for applied disciplines such as information retrieval, artificial intelligence and robotics. Inspired by a mathematical formalism tha...