In order to understand social systems, it is essential to identify the circumstances under which individuals spontaneously start cooperating or developing shared behaviors, norms, and culture. In this connection, it is important to study the role of social mechanisms such as repeated interactions, group selection, network formation, costly punishment and group pressure, and how they allow us to transform social dilemmas into interactive situations that promote the social system. Furthermore,...

We live in an increasingly interconnected world of 'techno-social' systems, where infrastructures composed of different technological layers are interoperating within the social component that drives their use and development. The multi-scale nature and complexity of these networks are crucial features in understanding and managing them. In the last decade advances in performance in computer technology, data acquisition and complex networks theory allow the generation of sophisticated...

The oceans are a critical component of the climate system, storing roughly 1000 times as much heat, and 50 times as much carbon, as the atmosphere. In this talk, Professor David Marshall (21st Century Ocean Institute, University of Oxford) will discuss the challenges of predicting the evolution of a complex system that is grossly under-sampled and spans a bewildering range of scales in both space and time. These challenges will be illustrated through the important but over-sensationalised...

Cities are getting more complex as their residents acquire more and more ways in which they can interact with one another. New technologies enable individuals to repackage their time and space in countless different combinations, and the flexibility afforded by such innovations makes possible many new ways in which individuals might react to this complexity. Behavioural change is considerably greater in the modern city than the medieval. Delivered by Professor Mike Batty: Director, Centre...

Growth, Innovation, and the Pace of Life from Cells and Ecosystems to Cities and Corporations; Are They Sustainable? Are cities and companies "just" very large organisms? They grow, metabolise, evolve and adapt; however, almost all cities survive, whereas all companies die. A quantitative, predictive, unifying framework for addressing such questions and understanding the generic structure, dynamics and life history of social and biological systems will be developed. It is based on general...

The recent banking crises have made it clear that increasingly complex strategies for managing risk in individual banks and investment funds (pension funds, etc) has not been matched by corresponding attention to overall systemic risks. Simple mathematical caricatures of 'banking ecosystems', which capture some of the essential dynamics and which have some parallels (along with significant differences) with earlier work on stability and complexity in ecological food webs, have interesting...