Objects and Arrows

In conjunction with a new doctoral program in complexity at ISCTE (University of Lisbon) Rui Lopes, Jorge Louçã, and I are hosting a winter school in complexity. (January 5-10 2009) The focus of the winter school will be social structures and communications networks. If you are interested in these areas, please consider attending: More details here

On January 10th we plan to close the winter school with the second annual workshop of the ICC. The event consists of an intense series of presentations and ample time for conversation. I thought our first meeting was very interesting with lots of productive interdisciplinary conversation. The workshop, like the winter school will also cover the topic of social structures in communication networks. It would be great to have participation from philosophers and anyone interested in these topics should consider sending an abstract. More details here

Some of our work on discovering emergent properties in communications networks is posted here on this draft website. If you’re interested in emergence, multi-agent systems and the like, some of our work may be useful to you. Please send us any comments you have. This is very much a work in progress.

Helder Coelho and Jorge Louçã are organizing a conference on complexity in social systems for January 11-12 in Lisbon. Send a paper in if you’re working in complexity, it should be a good meeting (except for the lousy invited speaker) and Lisbon is a spectacularly wonderful city. The webpage for the conference is here
Here’s the announcement and CFP:

The 1st ICC Workshop on Complexity in Social Systems will be concerned with theories, methodologies, and computational tools related to the study of complexity in social systems, aiming to bring together researchers to report on progress in interdisciplinary domains. Papers examining both theory and practice are welcome.

Theoretical areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• methodological issues addressing complexity in social systems
• measures of complexity
• models of emergent social phenomena
• social structure identification and pattern matching in social representations
• tools to represent social systems, including dynamic social networks, multi-agent based simulation, cellular automata, and dynamic systems

Application domains might concern, for instance:

• logistics
• traffic regulation
• urban and regional social studies
• decision support systems
• public policies
• economic models
• innovation diffusion networks
• biological inspired representations of social phenomena
• ecological models
• e-health
• propagation models applied to biology, public health (epidemiology), and others
• communication networks
  Workshop chairs: Helder Coelho and Jorge Louçã