Landa uses the keyword "Embedded Intelligence"
to outline the fact that new technologies are finding
their way into every-day life - a process which is changing
the structure of our society and shifting interaction patterns.
Using intelligent transport systems as an example,
he describes the consequences of this development.
Furthermore, Landa principally considers the question of
how people could learn to administer themselves in networks
and how one could consequently succeed in designing heterogeneity
as such and at the same time avoid hierarchical structures in 
networks.

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Mario De Landa

EMBEDDED INTELLIGENCE AND PROCESSES OF SELF-ORGANIZATION: THE CASE OF INTELLIGENT VEHICLE / HIGHWAY SYSTEMS

One useful way of viewing the evolution of computer technology is as a slow migration of problem-solving skills from the human body to formal systems, and from there to electro-mechanical devices. That is, when Aristotle created his famous syllogistic logic, he in effect transferred some elementary skills from humans to a mechanical recipe (or algorithm). Later on, nineteenth century logicians (Boole, Frege) enlarged the capabilities of these algorithms to encompass other deductive logic skills. When Alan Turing created his imaginary machine to execute these mechanical recipes, and then, under the pressure of WW2, he, and others like John Von Neumann, finally embodied this abstract device into a concrete machine, one more link in this transfer of mechanical intelligence took place. Thus, it was a slow but real migration from the human nervous system to computers in three steps. Problem-solving skills, which began as informal heuristics (or rules of thumb) embodied in flesh, end up as algorithms in silicon, via the intermediate step of combinatorial rules working with physical inscriptions on pieces of paper. Nowadays, this second step has been eliminated by knowledge engineers, who transfer human heuristics directly to the machine, through a process of intense interviewing of human experts, a process in which informal, half-conscious skills are brought to the surface, articulated and formalized, and then compiled together to create a so-called "Expert System", the most succesful product of Symbolic Artificial Intelligence to date.