This volume contains the proceedings of the workshop held in March 1990
at Austin, Texas on Self-Organization, Emerging Properties and Learning.
The workshop was co-sponsored by NATO Scientific Affairs Division,
Solvay Institutes of Physics and Chemistry, the University of Texas at
Austin and IC2 Institute at Austin. It gathered representatives from a
large spectrum of scientific endeavour. The subject matter of
self-organization extends over several fields such as hydrodynamics,
chemistry, biology, neural networks and social sciences. Several key
concepts are common to all these different disciplines. In general the
self-organization processes in these fields are described in the
framework of the nonlinear dynamics, which also governs the mechanisms
underlying the learning processes. Because of this common language, it
is expected that any progress in one area could benefit other fields,
thus a beneficial cross fertilization may result. In last two decades
many workshops and conferences had been organized in various specific
fields dealing with self-organization and emerging properties of
systems. The aim of the workshop in Austin was to bring together
researchers from seemingly unrelated areas and interested in
self-organization, emerg{ng properties and learning capabilities of
interconnected multi-unit systems. The hope was to initiate interesting
exchange and lively discussions. The expectations of the organiziers are
materialized in this unusual collection of papers, which brings together
in a single volume representative research from many related fields.
Thus this volume gives to the reader a wider perspective over the
generality and ramifications of the key concepts of self- organization.
