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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
In this talk I will present a personal view of nonlinear and complex systems sciences within the current climate of accelerated discovery and its role in the coming decades. The increasing interconnectedness of human interactions from the individual level to the level of organizations and countries generates an explosive growth of challenges, at a rate that is faster than we can even begin to solve them. Data becomes wast and very high dimensional, making search for relevant information a Sisyphean task. However, there are examples of research (such as in materials design) where discovery would have been accelerated by several years, had we searched for solutions across traditional boundaries. Are there principled approaches to modeling and understanding complex interacting systems that are computationally efficient, sufficiently accurate, and do not miss emergent behavior? I will illustrate some of these challenges through my own work as well, which includes modeling flows in large scale transportation networks, modeling the cortical network of the primate brain and the design of non-conventional algorithms for hard constraint satisfaction problems.
Host: Robert Ecke