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I am currently attending the European Conference on Complex Systems (ECCS'06) held at the University of Oxford. ECCS'06 is the second annual conference organized by the European Complex Systems Society and my first formal conference as a PhD student and a member of the European Complex Systems Society (ECSS).
The format of the conference is based on three equally important ingredients. First, its plenary speakers are drawn from a broad range of disciplines, and are widely recognised as leaders in their respective fields, as well as leaders in crossing disciplinary boundaries. The plenary talks give conference participants, including those who are not experts in a given field, an opportunity to hear an intelligent and panoramic overview of a particular research area.
Second, in the afternoons, the conference features multi-track sessions for the presentation of high quality, peer-reviewed research papers. These papers reflect some of the most exciting international research on complex systems currently underway. In such a highly interdisciplinary conference it is impossible to identify completely distinct and non-overlapping conference tracks, but on the basis of the submissions the following four broadly defined themes were identified:
- Biology and Cognition
- Concepts and Methods
- Networks
- Social and Economic Systems
Third, on the final two days of the conference 13 satellite workshops take place, which reflect topics that have been identified as interesting in a bottom-up manner by the research community.
The overarching theme of the conference is encapsulated in the phrase "towards a new science of complex systems". The empirical studies of complex systems have made very substantial progress in recent years as a result of advances in information and communication technology, and due to large increases in computational power. As a result of this technological progress an increasing mass of data in many application domains is now both accessible and manageable. At the same time, and no less importantly, we now have good evidence that complex systems in what would conventionally be considered radically different application domains appear to share many new and fundamental theoretical questions. This in turn encourages the development of novel and cross-disciplinary theoretical tools which can help us achieve a better understanding of complex systems.
Modelling and understanding the dynamics of complex systems remains one of the major challenges for modern science. |
