European Conference on Complex Systems (ECCS '06) is to be held at the Said Business School, University of Oxford (immediately next to Oxford Railway Station) 25-29 September 2006
Modelling and understanding the dynamics of complex systems remains one of the major challenges for modern science.
An invited group of internationally renowned scholars with an interest in complexity will come together at the Said Business School to shape a new science of complex systems in Europe and beyond.
Empirical studies of complex systems, which we can view as networks of interacting entities, have made substantial progress in recent years as a result of the rapidly increasing mass of data which has become accessible and manageable in many different application domains - from cellular biology to online communities and business.
Although they may seem unrelated, these different domains seem to share many new and fundamental theoretical questions that can now be addressed.
The conjunction of these two trends should encourage the interdisciplinary development of a new science of complex systems.
The conference will have four main topic tracks: Biology and Cognition, Concepts and Methods, Networks, Social and Economic Systems.
The orientation of this conference is highly interdisciplinary, and it will mix together a broad range of disciplines and a variety of rigorous research methods in a way that will stimulate new ideas, and help build the complex systems research community.
The event will consist of presentations from invited speakers, as well as multi-track sessions which will allow for the presentation of high quality, peer-reviewed papers which reflect some of the most exciting research presently underway on complex systems.
Confirmed speakers include:.
Special plenary session: Complex Science from the Perspective of Industry - Matthias Kaiserswerth, director of IBM Zurich Research Laboratory and IBM vice president for Global Systems.
Professor Henri Atlan, EHESS, Paris (France) Self-organising Systems: a typology.
Professor Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, University of Notre Dame (USA) The architecture of complexity: from the web to the cell.
Professor Dennis Bray, University of Cambridge (UK) Bacterial chemotaxis: using computer models to unravel mechanism.
Professor Eric Goles, Institute for Complex Systems, ISCV, Valparaiso (Chile) Cellular automata as a complex system paradigm: short-cut theorems and complexity.
Professor Holger Kantz, Max-Planck-Institut fur Physik komplexer Systeme (Germany) Extreme events - a challenge to the understanding of complex dynamics.
Professor Cris Moore, University of New Mexico and Santa Fe Institute (USA) Phase transitions in physics and computer science - a tale of two cultures.
Professor David Mumford, Brown University (USA) The complexity of thought - two fundamental issues.
Professor Rolf Pfeifer, University of Zurich (Switzerland) Morphological computation - connecting brain, body, and environment.
Professor Sander van der Leeuw, Arizona State University and Santa Fe Institute (USA) Complex systems modelling in the anthropocene.
Professor Marcelo Viana, IMPA, (Brazil) A probabilistic view of deterministic dynamical systems.
