Evolving Systems
July 12-13, 2005 in Miami, Florida

conference overview
Evolvable systems abound, including the web, wireless networks, manufacturing supply chains, peer-
to-peer systems, software development processes, and blogs. We normally don’t think about them as evolving, since we’ve come to accept their incremental adjustments and improvements as part of daily life.

As evolvable systems grow, they respond to conditions in the present, becoming gradually more complex. Sometimes, they sneak up on us, and often, almost too late, we don’t appreciate the power or influence of these systems until they have become significant. That is their strength, since they are free of centrally designed protocols and imposed standards. Evolving infrastructures will always be partially incomplete and partially wrong. In many instances, they exhibit a grassroots, quirky, and anti-authoritarian nature.

Evolutionary systems in nature employ a language in the specification of their design: DNA. For engineered systems, it’s feedback and usage. Lessons learned from biological processes often work in our networked, engineered systems. As the complexity of such systems grows, we are seeing the development of evolutionary algorithms designed to make small modifications to a given design and to rank the improvements against the previous design.

In most cases, the “next big thing” won’t be unitary, but rather a combination of many small things, evolving in different and sometimes parallel directions concurrently. At this conference, we’ll look at evolving technology systems and their patterns, and predict where they might end up. Which ones are on the rise today, perhaps below our radar screen? What strategies might we employ to get the most out of such systems? We’ll also survey various tools and techniques that might give us insight into evolutionary strategies.

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speakers
Mr. David Anderson, CEO, Sendmail, Inc.
Mr. Dave Hollander, Co-inventor, XML and CTO, Contivo, Inc.
Mr. William Hurley, Founder and CEO, Symbiot
Mr. Cedric Laurant, Policy Counsel and Director of the International Privacy Project, Electronic Privacy Information Center
Mr. David Lehman, Senior Vice President for Information & Technology, MITRE Corporation
Dr. Richard Lenski, Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Michigan State University
Dr. Terry Lohrenz, Research Fellow, Human Neuroimaging Laboratory, Baylor College of Medicine
Dr. Craig Nevill-Manning, Senior Research Scientist, Google, Inc.
Mr. Bruce Perens, Co-founder, Open Source Initiative
Dr. Steen Rasmussen, Team Leader, Self-organizing Systems, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Mr. Blake Ross, Creator, Firefox
Ms. Solveig Singleton, Senior Adjunct Fellow, Progress and Freedom Foundation
Mr. Herb Sutter, Architect, Developer Division, Microsoft
Mr. Vincent Weafer, Senior Director, Security Response, Symantec Corp.
Mr. Ethan Zuckerman, Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School

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