Author: cxdig

Tenth International Conference on Guided Self-Organization (GSO-2022)

The 10th International Conference on Guided Self-Organization takes place during 12-13 December 2022 in Auckland, New Zealand. GSO-2022 is organized jointly by the Te Pûnaha Matatini (Centre for Complex Systems) at The University of Auckland, the Centre for Complex Systems at The University of Sydney, and The International Association for Guided Self-Organization (TIA-GSO).

Keynote Speakers
Susan Stepney, University of York, UK
Peter Wills, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Sara I. Walker, Arizona State University, USA
Mike Steel, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

If interested in participating, send an extended abstract (two pages, pdf) by June 30th, 2022

Read the full article at: www.guided-self.org

Calls for the 2022 CSS Emerging Researcher, Junior, and Senior Scientific Awards

The Complex Systems Society announces the ninth edition of the CSS Scientific Awards.

The CSS Emerging Researcher Award recognizes promising researchers in Complex Systems within 3 years of PhD completion.

The Junior Scientific Award is aimed at recognizing excellent scientific record of young researchers within 10 years of PhD completion.

The senior scientific award will recognize outstanding contributions of Complex Systems scholars at whatever stage of their careers.

Deadline: May 31st, 2022.

More at: cssociety.org

Coexistence in diverse communities with higher-order interactions

Theo Gibbs, Simon A. Levin, Jonathan M. Levine

A central assumption in most ecological models is that the interactions in a community operate only between pairs of species. However, the interaction between two species may be fundamentally changed by the presence of others. Although interactions among three or more species, called higher-order interactions, have the potential to modify our theoretical understanding of coexistence, ecologists lack clear expectations for how these interactions shape community structure. Here, we analytically predict and numerically confirm how the variability and strength of higher-order interactions affect species coexistence. We found that, as higher-order interaction strengths become more variable across species, fewer species coexist, echoing the behavior of pairwise models. If inter-specific higher-order interactions become too harmful relative to self-regulation, coexistence was destabilized, but coexistence was also lost when these interactions were too weak and mutualistic effects became prevalent. Last, we showed that more species rich communities structured by higher-order interactions lose species more readily than their species poor counterparts, generalizing classic results for community stability. Our work provides needed theoretical expectation for how higher-order interactions impact species coexistence in diverse communities.

Read the full article at: www.biorxiv.org

The Language Game How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World

by Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater

Forget the language instinct—this is the story of how we make up language as we go

Language is perhaps humanity’s most astonishing capacity—and one that remains poorly understood. In The Language Game, cognitive scientists Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater show us where generations of scientists seeking the rules of language got it wrong. Language isn’t about hardwired grammars but about near-total freedom, something like a game of charades, with the only requirement being a desire to understand and be understood. From this new vantage point, Christiansen and Chater find compelling solutions to major mysteries like the origins of languages and how language learning is possible, and to long-running debates such as whether having two words for “blue” changes what we see. In the end, they show that the only real constraint on communication is our imagination.

More at: www.basicbooks.com

Higher-Order Systems

Edited by Federico Battiston, Giovanni Petri

This book discusses its potential to model real-world systems and how considering their higher-order organization can lead to the emergence of novel dynamical behavior. Over the last decades, networks have emerged as the paradigmatic framework to model complex systems. Yet, as simple collections of nodes and links, they are intrinsically limited to pairwise interactions, limiting our ability to describe, understand, and predict complex phenomena which arise from higher-order interactions. Here we introduce the new modeling framework of higher-order systems, where hypergraphs and simplicial complexes are used to describe complex patterns of interactions among any number of agents. This book is intended both as a first introduction and an overview of the state of the art of this rapidly emerging field, serving as a reference for network scientists interested in better modeling the interconnected world we live in.

Read the full article at: link.springer.com