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A talk given by Elsa Arcaute about bridging the bigger picture in co-creative processes at the “Co-Creating the Future: Participatory Cities and Digital Governance” conference in Vienna in September 2023. For more information on the conference visit: https://www.participatorycities.net.

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Binghamton Center of Complex Systems (CoCo) Seminar September 27, 2023 Cliff Joslyn (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory / Systems Science and Industrial Engineering,…

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One of the oldest of network problems is the ranking of individuals, teams, or commodities on the basis of pairwise comparisons between them. For example, if you know which football teams beat which others in a particular year, can you say which team is the best overall? This is a harder problem than it sounds because not all pairs of teams play games in a given season, and also because the outcomes of the games can be ambiguous or contradictory. This talk will introduce the techniques used to solve such ranking problems, with examples from games and sports, consumer research and marketing, and social hierarchies in both animal and human communities, then ask how those techniques can be extended to answer a range of new questions about competition and ranking, including the development of new computer algorithms for ranking, questions about the varying patterns of competition in different sports, and what happens when individuals or teams compete in multiple different ways.

Watch full talk at: www.mivideo.it.umich.edu

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Vijay Balasubramanian University of Pennsylvania, SFI The human brain consists of a 100 billion neurons connected by a 100 trillion synapses. In its computational function, each neuron is a simple electrical device. In this sense it is no different, in its conceptual essence, from a transistor or a diode in a silicon microchip, converting input signals into ephemeral voltage pulses that transmit to other neurons. And yet, the collective effect of these tiny electrical flutterings creates the intelligent mind, with its astonishing capacity for perception and action, memory and imagination, affection and indifference. In the words of Ramon y Cajal (1854-1932), a founding figure of neuroscience, neurons are “the mysterious butterflies of the soul, whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind.” In this talk, Vijay Balasubramanian will explore current ideas about how this transmutation occurs. 

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Carlos Gershenson

While studying rank dynamics, we have found a universal pattern across a broad variety of phenomena: more relevant elements change their rank slower than the majority of elements. Our hypothesis was that this temporal heterogeneity provides a balance between robustness (slow) and adaptability (fast) similar to criticality, but without the need of fine-tuning parameters. With this motivation, we have studied the effect of different types of heterogeneity (structural, temporal, and functional) in complex systems, and shown that each of these “extend” criticality. We have also used heterogeneity as a simple strategy to improve search algorithms. A question remains open: how to find “optimal” heterogeneity?

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