ELSI aims to answer the fundamental questions of how the Earth was formed, how life originated in the environment of early Earth, and how this life evolved into complexity. ELSI pursues these questions by studying the "origin and evolution of life" and the "origin and evolution of the Earth" through an interdisciplinary collaboration between the fields of Earth, Life, and Planetary Sciences. By understanding the early Earth context that allowed for the rise of initial life, we also work to establish a greater understanding of the likelihood of extraterrestrial life elsewhere in the universe.
We are now seeking exceptional candidates for the role of Principal Investigator (Professor or Associate Professor) to lead world-class interdisciplinary research relevant to the origin and evolution of life. ELSI works positively to eliminate biases against gender or national origin. We welcome all qualified candidates, regardless of nationality or gender. We encourage and support our candidates’ close collaborations with overseas research institutes. Our institutional language is English; Japanese language skills are not required. An unprecedented level of support for researchers to live and thrive in Japan is provided by our talented staff.

Source: www.elsi.jp

One of the defining features of living systems is their ability to process, exchange and store large amounts of information at multiple levels of organization, ranging from the biochemical to the ecological. At the same time, living entities are non-equilibrium—possibly at criticality—physical systems that continuously exchange matter and energy with structured environments, all while obeying the laws of thermodynamics. These properties not only lead to the emergence of biological information, but also impose constraints and trade-offs on the costs of such information processing. Some of these costs arise due to the particular properties of the material substrate of living matter in which information processing takes place, while others are universal and apply to all physical systems that process information.

In the past decade, the relationship between thermodynamics and information has received renewed scientific attention, attracting an increasing number of researchers and achieving significant progress. Despite this, the field is full of open problems and challenges at all levels, especially when dealing with biological systems. In spite of these difficulties, continued progress has the potential to fundamentally shape our future understanding of biology.

In this Special Issue we encourage researchers from theoretical biology, statistical physics, neuroscience, information theory, and complex systems to present their research on the connection between thermodynamics and information, with special emphasis on their implications for biological phenomena. We welcome contributions that focus on a particular biological system, as well as contributions that propose general theoretical approaches. We also welcome contributions that use mathematical techniques from statistical physics (variational methods, fluctuation theorems, uncertainty relations, etc.) to investigate biological questions.

Source: www.mdpi.com

Shannon famously applied his “mathematical theory of communication” to human communication, alledgedly having his wife, Betty, estimating word probabilities to calcualte the first approximation of the entropy of English. The following decades have seen creative further applications to humans and social processes (e.g., Miller, 1956; Attneave, 1959; Coleman, 1975; Ellis and Fisher, 1975; Cappella, 1979). These efforts lost steam in the 1980s, mainly because of the lack of adequate data, and limited computational power. Both limitations do not apply anymore. The increase in human interactions taking place in digital environments has led to an abundance of behavioral “big data”, enough even to calculate measures that converge rather slowly.

 

This Special Issue compiles creative research on the innovative uses of information theory, and its extensions, to better understand human behavior and social processes. Among other topics, the focus is set on human communication, social organization, social algorithms, human–machine interaction, artificial and human intelligence, collaborative teamwork, social media dynamics, information societies, digital development, and cognitive and machine biases—all online and/or offline. 

Source: www.mdpi.com

Complexity science, also called complex systems science, studies how a large collection of components – locally interacting with each other at small scales – can spontaneously self-organize to exhibit non-trivial global structures and behaviors at larger scales, often without external intervention, central authorities or leaders. The properties of the collection may not be understood or predicted from the full knowledge of its constituents alone. Such a collection is called a complex system and it requires new mathematical frameworks and scientific methodologies for its investigation.

Here are a few things you should know about complex systems,
result of a worldwide collaborative effort from leading experts, practitioners and students in the field.

Source: complexityexplained.github.io

At the most fundamental level many of the problems we face are the unfortunate outcome of the malpractice of thinking. Whichever complex problem one may consider –be it ecological, societal, political, economic, organisational etc.– one will likely find that it is caused by the clashing of incompatible or inadequate manners of thinking. Even when these are genuinely well intended and strongly self-justified, they often inadvertently contribute to composite problematics.
The inadequacies of our thinking are deeply entrenched in the way that we humans, perceive the world, ourselves in the world, and how we interact with it. Our professional, educational, cultural and metaphysical systems strongly dispose us towards outlining sharp boundaries, separating objects from backgrounds, ’us’ from ‘them’, defining identities and curving out what is to be of significance from what can be dismissed, disposed of, or exploited. Such dispositions result in oversimplifications which are often apparent to us in the thinking of others, but much less in our own thinking. Yet, they are omnipresent and almost impossible to avoid. Once cohered by logical reasoning, anchored in captivating symbolism and encoded in algorithms, such simplifications turn into cages: mental, emotional, operational… Moving beyond them becomes literally unthinkable. We may repeat the mantra of ‘thinking outside the box’, we may praise critical, independent, creative and disruptive thinking, but these get deployed only in as far as they prove usable for the affirmation of our respective, deeply rooted worldviews.

Source: schoolofthinking.be