The 2026 edition of the Complexity 72h Workshop has wrapped up in London, bringing together roughly 60 participants and 14 tutor teams for five days of intensive, collaborative science. Hosted by Northeastern University London and the Network Science Institute (NetSI) at their Devon House campus—a striking location overlooking London’s historic St Katharine Docks, the event carried on a tradition launched in 2018 where researchers form small teams around a specific project and work flat-out for 72 hours, with the goal of having a paper ready for an online repository by the time the clock runs out. The track record so far is perfect — all 33 projects from past editions have resulted in preprints, and 9 have gone on to become peer-reviewed publications, leading to long-term collaborations.

This year’s cohort tackled a notably wide range of questions. Projects spanned political polarization and belief networks, brain connectivity and the social self, regional greenhouse-gas trends, emergent deception in LLM-based agent models, statistical signatures of success in NBA basketball, patterns in egocentric communication networks, and the long-term impact of AI on education. The diversity of topics is part of what makes the format so productive: participants arrive from different disciplines and leave having genuinely done science together. 

True to the workshop’s mission of producing a research preprint within 72 hours, the results of the seven projects can already be viewed on arXiv

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