* Free, public seminar — all welcome. No RSVP required. *
Abstract:
Are crowds of people predictable? Can we disrupt criminal networks by taking out the kingpins? Is Oprah Winfrey more influential than you are? Can mistakes help to deliver a message faster? Are we reaching a pandemic tipping point, and if so, can we avoid it?
We live in a complex world and are surrounded by complex systems. From a biological cell, made of thousands of different molecules that work together seamlessly, to our global society; a collection of seven billion individuals that try to work and live together.
These complex systems display endless signatures of order, disorder, self-organisation and self-annihilation. Understanding this complexity is one of the biggest scientific challenges of our time.
In this talk I will discuss how this complexity emerges at the edge of chaos. I will peek into the collective behaviour cells, the intricacies of the immune system and the (un)importance of the kingpins of criminal networks, all 'magically' emerging from the simple rules of nature.
Speaker Bio:
Peter M.A. Sloot is research professor at the University of Amsterdam and a full professor and director of the Complexity Institute in NTU, Singapore.
He is a laureate of the Leading Scientist President’s program (2010) and received a Russian Federation Leading Scientist Award for his study on novel complexity models.
He has been the Principal Investigator of many international research programs on complex systems, such as www.virolab.org.
He is editor-in-chief of two highly ranked Elsevier Science journals.
Prof. Sloot was the promotor of 52 PhD theses and has published over 450 research papers.
His main interest is in understanding causality in complex adaptive systems, with particular application to health and biomedicine.
His work is covered in international media such as newspapers, TV interviews and documentaries.
Since 2016, he leads the ambitious Institute of Advanced Study of the University of Amsterdam.
He has a MSc Chemistry and a MSc Physics from the University of Amsterdam, and a PhD from the Dutch Cancer Institute.
For more details see: peter-sloot.com/