SYNERGINFO · Developments on the relevance of SYNERGistic INFOrmation sharing modes
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2017-05-01 → 2019-04-30
- EU contribution
- €183,455
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
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Results in brief
Developments on the relevance of SYNERGistic INFOrmation sharing modes
"The goal of this project was to study the relevance of relationships between three or more variables that cannot be reduced to a combination of pairwise relationships. One of the main drivers behind Complexity Science is that to understand many systems is ""less the matter and more the patterns""; i.e., the relationship between the constituent elements might be more relevant that the constituent themselves. Traditionally, this view has lead to the growing discipline of ""Complex Networks"", where pairwise relationships are lumped into a graph/network, whose global properties are then studied. In contrast, this project is about studying which relationships cannot be reflected by such network. This topic is very important for society, as it allow us to expand our understanding of what it means to be ""together"". Intuitively, we tend to think that ""togetherness"" can be only more or less, and hence can be quantified by a single number that assess it intensity. In contrast, this project explore different ""modes"" in which variables can be together. Given the political situation where trends towards a global society seem to be in direct opposition to nationalists movements that seek local independency, better understanding these modes might help to bring more dimensions into the discussion. The goal of the project are twofold: 1) To advance our theoretical understanding of these diverse modes of multivariate interdependency, and 2) Explore the implications that these modes might have in real-word scenarios. The scenarios studied in this project are very diverse, including the dynamics of the human brain, decentralised social systems, and data privacy."
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Recently, researchers have developed a new framework for decomposing the information that is shared by a number of variables, which characterizes public information that is shared by all the variables and private information that is contained only in specific elements. The main contribution of this work has been to distinguish between redundant and synergistic interdependencies: the former corresponds to variables that share the same information, while the latter refers to information sharing modes where the statistical dependency exists within the whole but not between the parts. The objective of this project is to analyze the relevance of synergistic modes of information sharing in different contexts, developing a deeper understanding of their nature and consequences. For this, the project has as specific goals (a) to further develop the theoretical framework for studying synergistic information sharing structures, and to use this framework to bring new light in important applications: (b) biometric databases and privacy due to its relevance for our modern society and (c) the study of brain activity due to its fascinating structure and function.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- IMPERIAL COLLEGE OF SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE · LondonCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union