On Wednesday 17th April, Professor Doyne Farmer, University of Oxford gave the CS4 talk “The economics of sustainability”. Beforehand Doyne talked to James about his complexity research when at the Santa Fe institute and his recent economic work at the University of Oxford.
On Wednesday 17th April, Professor Doyne Farmer, University of Oxford gave the CS4 talk “The economics of sustainability”.
On Wednesday 15th May, Professor Matthew Turner, University of Warwick, will give the CS4 talk “Social Fluids”
Building 53 Room 4025, Highfield Campus, 4-5pm. Refreshments served after the talk.
Abstract
“Bird flocks, insect swarms and fish shoals resemble fluids made up of many individuals in which the controlling interactions are social rather than physical in character. It may be that these animal systems tell us something about human societies or inform developments in swarm robotics. Some progress has been made recently on reverse-engineering candidate models for the interactions between animals that are local in space, either in a metric-based or topological sense. A question that has been largely overlooked is whether the interactions should be expected to be local in the first place. I will present evidence that they must have a non-local character and, furthermore, that there is a natural choice for this that is consistent with the cognitive limitations of animal vision. This leads us to propose a non-local hybrid-projection model. We use this model to make predictions about the global character of the swarm and present experimental data on bird flocks that confirm these predictions. Finally, I will discuss how these models are naturally associated with evolutionary fitness.”
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED AND WILL BE RESCHEDULED FOR LATER IN THE YEAR
The next Quantitative Biology Seminar Series event will take place in Building 44 Room
1041 at 15 May 2013 at 13:00 when Prof Jon Timmis, University of York, will give the talk “From Immune Systems to Robots”
On Wednesday 13th March, Paul Ormerod, Volterra Partners, gave the CS4 talk “Does quality matter? Rational agent behaviour in complex, 21st century systems”. Beforehand Paul talked to James about how economic theory needs to reflect the complex world in which we make decisions.
On Wednesday 17th April, Professor Doyne Farmer, University of Oxford will give the CS4
talk “The economics of sustainability”.
Building 53 Room 4025, Highfield Campus, 4-5pm. Refreshments served after the talk.
Abstract:
“Achieving sustainability requires understanding the complex interactions between a vast number of systems including climate, economics, technological progress, geology, ecology, space science, population control, security, global politics, and mass psychology. Sustainability forces us to think clearly about our vision of the future, putting philosophy into direct contact with science. As scientists our job is to try to understand causes and effects, both by making predictions and by quantifying the vast uncertainties as best we can. My talk will explore several topics relating to my own work on sustainability, including the subtleties involved in properly discounting the value of the future relative to the present, the flaws in economic models of climate mitigation (and thus the huge uncertainties in their predictions), and my current efforts to predict technological progress (which is perhaps not quite as unpredictable as one might imagine). I will provide a few mathematical illustrations, but most of all, I will try to paint a vision of the complex challenge that we all face.”
On Wednesday 13th March, Paul Ormerod, Volterra, gave the CS4 talk “Does quality matter? Rational agent behaviour in complex, 21st century systems”.
On Wednesday 6th March, Dr Rene Doursat, Drexel University, Philadelphia, gave the CS4 talk “Morphogenetic Engineering: the Two-Way Bridges Between Biomodelling, Bioinspired Engineering, and Bioengineering”.
On Wednesday 27th February, Dr Roman Frigg, London School of Economics, gave the CS4 talk “Laplace’s Demon and the Adventures of his Apprentices”. Before his talk, Roman talked to James about some important limitations of simulations and their ability to produce robust predictions.
On Wednesday 27th February, Dr Roman Frigg, London School of Economics, gave the CS4 talk “Laplace’s Demon and the Adventures of his Apprentices”
cs4southampton 