• network morphospaces
• visualization and dimensionality reduction
• system dynamics
• barriers to real-world application

• measuring the complexity of complex systems, dimensionality reduction/network compression, and visualization
• new philosophies/representations for evolving systems/networks
• limiting factors/barriers of existing tools/theories/models in real-world applications

A poster presentation will be held May 16. Submit your abstract here by May 13, 2019. 

Invitees include:

Alex Arenas 
Research Scientist, Dept. Computer Science and Mathematics (DEIM) at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain
Arenas has written more than 190 interdisciplinary publications in major peer reviewed including Nature, Nature Physics, PNAS, Physics Reports and Physical Review Letters, which have received more than 20000 citations. He is one of the few Europeans serving as Associate Editors of the most important publication in physics worldwide, the American Physical Society journal, Physical Review. He is in charge of the Complex Networks and Interdisciplinary Physics section of Physical Review E. He got the James Mc Donnell Foundation award for the study of complex systems in 2011. He was also recognized as ICREA Academia-Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, a catalan award that promotes the most recognized scientists from Catalonia in 2011 and 2017. He serve as Editor in Journal of Complex Networks, and in Network Neuroscience. He was elected for the Steering Committee of the Complex Systems Society in 2012. He is external faculty of the Complexity Hub Science in Vienna from 2017. He is the leader of the research group ALEPHSYS.

Alyssa M. Adams
VEDA Data Solutions, Labs Director and Data Scientist
I currently work in data science to make sense of large amounts of data, understand the mechanisms behind its creation, and generate models to understand systems as a whole. Going beyond machine learning, I am interested in analytically understanding the basic principles of systems with many interacting components. This way, insights can be gleaned from data in a deeper way to create more insights for social change.

Andrea Avena-Koenigsberger
Postdoctoral Research, Computational Neuroscience, and Board Member of the Center for Sustainable Living (CSL), Indiana University-Bloomington
Dr. Avena-Koenigsberger became a board member for the CSL in 2014, followed by roles as the board treasurer and now board president since 2016. She has been involved in many aspects of the organization, including the Grow Organic Educator Series (2014), the Community Bike Project, the Glenn Carter Memorial Toolshare (2015), ShareBloomington (2015), and BloomingVision (2016). Through the Toolshare and ShareBloomington, Ryan Conway and Andrea have promoted the sharing economy through several events, workshops, film screenings, and speaker series. They have also established collaborations with other local organizations, including the City’s Commission on Sustainability, the Bloomington Food Policy Council, the Council of Neighborhood Associations, BloomingLabs, and Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard. In addition, Andrea and Ryan created hOUR Bloomington, a time bank which used time as a currency rather than money. In 2016, Andrea worked with CSL founder Christine Glaser, Ryan Conway, and Eric Ost to provide feedback on the City’s Comprehensive Master Plan through BloomingVision, a former CSL project that they revived in order to call for better sustainability and higher environmental standards in Bloomington. Recently, Andrea has focused heavily on re-organizing the CSL as a whole, reinforcing and creating new connections between projects and the board of directors.

Ginestra Bianconi
Reader in Applied Mathematics,School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, U.K.
Ginestra Bianconi is Reader of Applied Mathematics and the Head of the Complex Systems and Network group at the School of Mathematical Sciences of Queen Mary University of London and she is  Alan Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. Currently she is Editor of PloSOne, and Scientific Reports, and she is Associate Editor of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals. Her research activity on Statistical Mechanics and Network Science includes Network Theory and its interdisciplinary applications. She has formulated the Bianconi-Barabasi model that displays the Bose-Einstein condensation in complex networks. She  has worked in network entropy and network ensembles and on dynamical processes on networks. In the last years she has been focusing on multilayer networks, network geometry and topology, percolation and network control. She is the author of the book Multilayer Networks: Structure and Function  by Oxford University Press.

Nitesh Chawla
Frank M. Freimann Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, Director of The Interdisciplinary Center for Network Science & Applications (iCeNSA), University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN
Dr. Chawla is passionate about Big Data for the Common Good. His research is making fundamental advances in machine learning, network and data science, especially in the areas of link prediction, higher order networks, co-evolution and dynamics of networks, learning from imbalanced data, distributed learning, concept drift, and evaluation issues for machine learning and data mining algorithms. His research is bridging disciplinary boundaries for transformative applications in healthcare, education, environment, and national security --- technology meets society to augment human intelligence and creativity.

Bernat Corominas-Murtra
Associated Researcher, Institute of Science and Technology Austria, Vienna, Austria
The emergence of complexity is one of the most fascinating phenomena of nature. From human language to stem cell biology, biological evolution or the development of technology, the emergence of complex order seems to defy the laws of physics. As a researcher I try to disentangle small bits of this formidable problem, following an approach that integrates non equilibrium physics, stochastic processes, complex networks and information theory. I addressed specific problems, such as the nature of hierarchy, the emergence of scaling or the properties of systems with non-stable phase spaces. Currently I develop my research activity at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria within the research group leaded by Edouard Hanezzo exploring the potential existence physical principles underlying stem cell dynamics. In parallel, I try to find new general forms of Information Theory to address the conceptual challenges imposed by living systems.

Ernesto Estrada
Professor at The Institute of Mathematics and Applications, University of Zaragoza (Spain)
Professor Estrada has an internationally leading reputation for shaping and developing the study of complex networks. His expertise ranges in the areas of network structure, algebraic network theory, dynamical systems on networks and the study of random models of networks. He has a distinguished track record of high-quality publications, which has attracted more than 8,000 citations. His h-index (number of papers with at least h citations) is 51. His publications are in the areas of network theory and its applications to social, ecological, engineering, physical, chemical and biological real-world problems. Professor Estrada has published two text books on network sciences both published by Oxford University Press in 2011 and 2015, respectively. He has demonstrated a continuous international leadership in his field where he has been invited and plenary speaker at the major conferences in network sciences and applied mathematics.

Ryan Gregory James
Postdoctoral Researcher, Dept. of Physics, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA
I am interested in how natural and engineered complex systems are structured. To do so, I generally use tools from physics, information theory, and automata theory. Structure is a deviation from randomness, and information theory provides methods for quantifying how non-random a system is. My primary work with information theory involves constructing and interpreting multivariate measures of shared information. A complimentary way to understand structure is via automata. Here, we consider the minimal computational model necessary to produce the patterns of interest, allowing one to infer that the system under consideration is at least as sophisticated the minimal model.

Vincenzo Nicosia
Lecturer in Networks and Data Analysis, Queen Mary University of London, U.K.
Dr. Nicosia is a Lecturer in the Complex Systems and Networks Group. His research is focused on the structure and dynamics of networks, and in particular on the characterisation and modelling of processes on multilayer and multiplex networks. He has been working on random walks, synchronisation, diffusion and opinion dynamics on networks, on growth models for time-varying and multi-layer networks, and on applications of network science to spatial systems, in particular cities and the human brain. He is currently a member of the Council and of the Executive Committee of the Complex Systems Society.

Luis M. Rocha
Professor and director of the NSF-NRT Complex Networks and Systems Graduate Program in Informatics, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
Dr. Rocha is also a member of the Indiana University Network Science Institute, and core faculty of the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. He is a Fulbright Scholar and is Principal Investigator at the Instituto Gulbenkian da Ciencia, Portugal, and has been a Visiting Professor of the Neuroscience Program, at the Champalimaud Foundation in Portugal, and the Center for Theoretical Physics at the Aix-Marseille University, France. His research is on complex networks & systems, computational & systems biology, and computational intelligence. He received his Ph.D in Systems Science in 1997 from the State University of New York at Binghamton. From 1998 to 2004 he was a permanent staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he founded and led a Complex Systems Modeling Team during 1998-2002, and was part of the Santa Fe Institute research community. He has organized major conferences in the field such as the Tenth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (Alife X) and the Ninth European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2007). He has published many articles in scientific and technology journals, and has been the recipient of several scholarships and awards. At Indiana University, he has received the Indiana University, School of Informatics & Computing.

Marta Sales-Pardo
Associate Professor, Departament d'Engineyria Química at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain
Marta Sales-Pardo (Barcelona, 1976) graduated in Physics at Universitat de Barcelona in 1998, and obtained a PhD in Physics from Universitat de Barcelona in 2002. She then moved to Northwestern University, where she first worked as a postdoctoral fellow and, later, as a Fulbright Scholar. In 2008, she became a Research Assistant Professor at the Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Science Institute with joint appointments in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. In 2009, she accepted her current posistion as an Associate Professor in the Departament d'Engineyria Química at Universitat Rovira i Virgili.

Hector Zenil
Karolinska Institutet, Sweden / Paris 1, France / Oxford, U.K.
My main research aim is to develop methods to reprogram living biological cells like we do computers to create synthetic forms, steer behaviour and help fight diseases at a molecular/genetic level. My research interests include algorithmic information dynamics, causality in complex networks, and complex systems.

We hope to see you at the event!

Profs. Joaquín Goñi & Mario Ventresca
School of Industrial Engineering
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN

Questions: Joaquín Goñi at jgonicor@purdue.edu or Mario Ventresca mventresca@purdue.edu