Santa Fe Institute Events Wiki - User contributions [en]

Experiment sign-up

2012-06-19T20:49:03Z

AGomez: /* Tuesday June 19 */

Hi! Please sign up for one slot below. The experiment will be held in the SENIOR Common Room (again) next to the great hall (YES, JP's office). Please arrive on time! Ta.

- Katrien, Vanessa, Sandro, Cameron & Jasmeen

==Monday June 18==

Morning Break:

10.20-10.30: Piotr X

10.30-10.40: Laurent X

Lunch Break:

12.05-12.15: Chloe X

'''12.15-12.25: Andres ???'''

12.25-12.35: Xue X

12.35-12.45: Oleksandr X

12.55-1.05: Nick A X

1.05-1.15: Fabio X

1.15-1.25: Priya X

Afternoon:

5.00-5.10: Matteo X

5.10-5.20: Abby X

5.20-5.30: Elena X

5.30-5.40: Riccardo X

5.40-5.50: [[JP]]! X

6.00-6.10: [[Xin]] X

6.10-6.20: Ian X

6.20-6.30: Keegan

6.30-6.40: Aleksandra

6.40-6.50: Tom X

6.50-7.00:Christa X

==Tuesday June 19==

Morning Break:

10.20-10.30: Vikram X

Afternoon:

4.30-4.40: dan

4.40-4.50: Georg W. / Ben

4.50-5.00: Sander Bais / Sepehr

5.00-5.10: Aleksandra

5.10-5.20: Marque

5.20-5.30: Sarah

5.30-5.40: Oscar

5.40-5.50: Marco

5.50-6.00: Andres

6.00-6.10:

6.10-6.20:

6.20-6.30:

6.30-6.40:

6.40-6.50:

6.50-7.00:

Andres Gomez-Lievano

2012-06-19T05:13:38Z

AGomez: /* Ideas for projects */

[[File:Mesa-Verde_20110528_006.jpg|left|thumbnail|450px|Me at Mesa Verde National Park]]

My name is Andres Gomez-Lievano, I was born in Bogota, Colombia, almost now 28 years ago. I am about to start my second year in my PhD in Applied Mathematics at Arizona State University.

My general concern is with studying and understanding cities, but I'm very eager to learn about all the other fields and interests that people are bringing to the school.

E-mail: agomez137@gmail.com

==Ideas for projects==
- What are the underlying mechanisms behind innovation? Empirically we know that in metropolitan areas (at least in the US), bigger cities produce more patents per capita than smaller ones. However, we have also data for the number of inventors in a city. Surprinsingly, patents per inventor remain stable. How is it that cities attract (or create) more `inventors'? I have some data of inventors and patents that could be useful to answer some of the questions regarding innovation.

- My previous focus within the topic of cities, was to study crime. I was not interested in the particular instances (for which there are plenty of studies and anecdotes) but rather in the most general and universal patterns that we may be able to find in urban systems regarding homicides (see [http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/12-02-001.pdf this link for part of my work on homicides]). Empirically, given a fixed population size, the distribution of homicides is log-normal. Why?? I have some data of homicides for cities in different countries in Latin America, and I think there is still plenty of room to come up with something new by applying a complex systems approach to crime.

Very far from my own comfort zone:

- I am particularly interested in macroecology. I don't have any background, so I am very interested in learning. I want to understand how does the low-entropy energy of the sun gets transformed and degraded by Earth's ecosystems back into empty space. If biological organisms have evolved somehow to use energy efficiently (i.e. degrading efficiently energy gradients), what does allometric scaling say about this? Can this energy gradient determine the "depth" of the trophic levels? I would like to delve at some point in my life to the understanding of biological evolution from a thermodynamic point of view.

==Previous works and interests==
I did my undergraduate degree in Physics at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota. I became interested very early during my studies in collective systems and so my emphasis was mostly in Statistical Mechanics. My final degree project was about a simple model of a Sandpile in a Scale-free Network, in which I focused in deriving analytically the 'critical exponents'. I became in love of self-organized criticality, scaling and power-laws, which turned into an interest in the topic of `extreme events', disasters and crisis.

In my master degree in Industrial Engineering I became interested in cities. My thesis was about the effects of the fractal makeup of cities (the urban fabric does not fill space homogeneously and has actually an approximate fractal structure) on traffic. The way cities fill space affects its internal street network, which in turn determines to a great extent its internal traffic dynamics; I analysed a very simple computational model to understand the essentials of this phenomenon.

After I finished my master degree, I worked for a year and a half in the Financial Risk Management division of one Colombia's financial companies.

==On a more philosophical side==
It is my opinion that we are in a conceptual crisis in the study of cities, and this also interests me. By now, it is clear to me that many of the approaches taken so far to understand cities and explain their differences have been mostly unsuccessful: we still do not know why some cities flourish and thrive and others do not, why some expand while others stagnate, what are the cities good for, or how exactly does the creation of wealth within them comes about. The problem, from my point of view, is not so much that we lack the data, or that we are dealing with systems composed of human beings, each with unique characteristics and complex behaviors, but rather that our conceptual frameworks are inadequate. This inability to have successful theories is, for me, a manifestation that we have been dealing with a wrong set of concepts (to say which ones is also unclear). And no matter how hard we try or how sophisticated we might become, if we are dealing with the wrong concepts to explain a phenomenon, that phenomenon is going to remain unexplained.

It has been recognized for some while now that cities should be understood as 'processes' rather than 'objects'. But thinking of them as processes does not change the fact that we still think of them as actual physical and well defined objects. And in doing so, for example, we assign particular people to particular cities to count their populations, and we create geographical boundaries (political or economical), to construct our urban quantities. I want to challenge that notion. I do not see cities as physical constructions, but rather as abstract social ones. This social construction do manifests itself physically, and indeed we should quantify those manifestations. But I think we should bear in mind that each person has different "degrees of belonging" to different cities, and that there is a continuum between rural and urban areas.

So in the long term, I would like to help develop a different conceptual framework from which we can understand better the urban phenomenon.

Experiment sign-up

2012-06-17T21:40:26Z

AGomez: /* Monday June 18 */

Hi! Please sign up for one slot below. The experiment will be held in the Senior Common Room (JP's office) next to the great hall. Please arrive on time!

- Katrien, Vanessa, Sandro, Cameron & Jasmeen

==Monday June 18==

Morning Break:

9.30-9.40: Ryan

9.40-9.50: Benji

9.50-10.00: Friederike

10.00-10.10: Oscar

10.10-10.20: Tom

10.20-10.30: Piotr

10.30-10.40: Laurent

Lunch Break:

12.05-12.15: Chloe

12.15-12.25: Andres

12.25-12.35:

12.35-12.45:

12.55-1.05:

1.05-1.15:

1.15-1.25:

Afternoon:

4.30-4.40:

4.40-4.50:

4.50-5.00: Sarah

5.00-5.10:

5.10-5.20:

5.20-5.30:

5.30-5.40:

5.40-5.50:

5.50-6.00:

6.00-6.10:

6.10-6.20:

6.20-6.30:

6.30-6.40:

6.40-6.50:

6.50-7.00:

Andres Gomez-Lievano

2012-06-17T18:58:30Z

AGomez: /* Previous works and interests */

[[File:Mesa-Verde_20110528_006.jpg|left|thumbnail|450px|Me at Mesa Verde National Park]]

My name is Andres Gomez-Lievano, I was born in Bogota, Colombia, almost now 28 years ago. I am about to start my second year in my PhD in Applied Mathematics at Arizona State University.

My general concern is with studying and understanding cities, but I'm very eager to learn about all the other fields and interests that people are bringing to the school.

E-mail: agomez137@gmail.com

==Ideas for projects==
- What are the underlying mechanisms behind innovation? Empirically we know that in metropolitan areas (at least in the US), bigger cities produce more patents per capita than smaller ones. However, we have also data for the number of inventors in a city. Surprinsingly, patents per inventor remains stable. How is it that cities attract (or create) more `inventors'? I have some data of inventors and patents that could be useful to answer some of the questions regarding innovation.

- My previous focus within the topic of cities, was to study crime. I was not interested in the particular instances (for which there are plenty of studies and anecdotes) but rather in the most general and universal patterns that we may be able to find in urban systems regarding homicides (see [http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/12-02-001.pdf this link for part of my work on homicides]). Empirically, given a fixed population size, the distribution of homicides is log-normal. Why?? I have some data of homicides for cities in different countries in Latin America, and I think there is still plenty of room to come up with something new by applying a complex systems approach to crime.

Very far from my own comfort zone:

- I am particularly interested in macroecology. I don't have any background, so I am very interested in learning. I want to understand how does the low-entropy energy of the sun gets transformed and degraded by Earth's ecosystems back into empty space. If biological organisms have evolved somehow to use energy efficiently (i.e. degrading efficiently energy gradients), what does allometric scaling say about this? Can this energy gradient determine the "depth" of the trophic levels? I would like to delve at some point in my life to the understanding of biological evolution from a thermodynamic point of view.

==Previous works and interests==
I did my undergraduate degree in Physics at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota. I became interested very early during my studies in collective systems and so my emphasis was mostly in Statistical Mechanics. My final degree project was about a simple model of a Sandpile in a Scale-free Network, in which I focused in deriving analytically the 'critical exponents'. I became in love of self-organized criticality, scaling and power-laws, which turned into an interest in the topic of `extreme events', disasters and crisis.

In my master degree in Industrial Engineering I became interested in cities. My thesis was about the effects of the fractal makeup of cities (the urban fabric does not fill space homogeneously and has actually an approximate fractal structure) on traffic. The way cities fill space affects its internal street network, which in turn determines to a great extent its internal traffic dynamics; I analysed a very simple computational model to understand the essentials of this phenomenon.

After I finished my master degree, I worked for a year and a half in the Financial Risk Management division of one Colombia's financial companies.

==On a more philosophical side==
It is my opinion that we are in a conceptual crisis in the study of cities, and this also interests me. By now, it is clear to me that many of the approaches taken so far to understand cities and explain their differences have been mostly unsuccessful: we still do not know why some cities flourish and thrive and others do not, why some expand while others stagnate, what are the cities good for, or how exactly does the creation of wealth within them comes about. The problem, from my point of view, is not so much that we lack the data, or that we are dealing with systems composed of human beings, each with unique characteristics and complex behaviors, but rather that our conceptual frameworks are inadequate. This inability to have successful theories is, for me, a manifestation that we have been dealing with a wrong set of concepts (to say which ones is also unclear). And no matter how hard we try or how sophisticated we might become, if we are dealing with the wrong concepts to explain a phenomenon, that phenomenon is going to remain unexplained.

It has been recognized for some while now that cities should be understood as 'processes' rather than 'objects'. But thinking of them as processes does not change the fact that we still think of them as actual physical and well defined objects. And in doing so, for example, we assign particular people to particular cities to count their populations, and we create geographical boundaries (political or economical), to construct our urban quantities. I want to challenge that notion. I do not see cities as physical constructions, but rather as abstract social ones. This social construction do manifests itself physically, and indeed we should quantify those manifestations. But I think we should bear in mind that each person has different "degrees of belonging" to different cities, and that there is a continuum between rural and urban areas.

So in the long term, I would like to help develop a different conceptual framework from which we can understand better the urban phenomenon.

Complex Systems Summer School 2012-After Hours

2012-06-16T07:36:38Z

AGomez: /* Trip to Taos */

{{Complex Systems Summer School 2012}}

Use this space to organize your own after hours activities.

==Dancing at the Rouge Cat==

Some of us will be going dancing on Friday night at the [http://rougecat.com/ Rouge Cat] they have a downstairs disco floor and it's a whole lot of fun. JP and I will be leaving SJC parking circle around 10:00p.m. to head over there. For those who do not sign up for a car don't forget Friday and Saturday $5 cabs.

Car 1: Juniper's Car 

1.

2.

3.

4.

Car 2: JP's Car 

1.

2.

3.

4.

==Some Banjo fun out on the town==

My brother will be having a concert this Saturday June 16 at the Second Street Brewery (original location) from 6-9p.m. I will be at the parking circle at 6p.m. For those who do not sign up for a car don't forget Friday and Saturday $5 cabs.

[http://www.secondstreetbrewery.com/2012/05/todd-the-fox-9/ Todd and the Fox Venue Details]

[http://www.toddandthefox.com/fr_home.cfm To hear their music]

If anyone would like to join:

Car 1: Juniper's Car 

1. Katrien (not sure if we'll be back from the lake trip by 6pm. Somebody can take my place if they want.) back up: Georg Weber

2. Marque

3. Sarah

4. Marco

==Dancing==
The beginner tango classes tonight (Thursday, 14th June) are open to drop-ins, especially if we have lead-follow parity, but they're expensive for intro dance classes: $20 from 7:30 to 9. 
1. Chloe 
2. Vikram 
3. Aleksandra 

We'll share a cab from in front of the dining hall, leaving 7PM.

Other varieties --

There's a contra on the 23rd; swing dancing most Mondays; this is supposed to be a great tango town, and I'm looking for drop-in-friendly beginner classes...

[http://www.santafenewmexican.com/Sidebar/Dance_fever_in_Santa_Fe swing, salsa, tango]

[http://www.folkmads.org/may_jun_calendar12.html contras, here and ABQ]

We've heard great Appalachian-style folk musicians here already, but I haven't found a ceili or hoedown locally.

--Chloe

==Trip to Taos==

JP and Tom are going to go to Taos on Saturday 6/16. Sights to see will include the High Road to Taos, Taos Pueblo, the Taos Gorge, Taos Earthships, and the plenty of Taos Hippies.
 
Car 1: JP's Camry 

1.[[JP]] 
2.Nick G 
3.Piotr 
4.Matteo 
5.Vikram 
 

Car 2: Tom's Car 
1 
2 Miguel 
3 Riccardo 
4 Priya 

From Andres: I'm sorry... I decided to stay tomorrow at St. John's. I'm very sorry to letting you know so late...! I want to rest, and there is some work I'd like to do...

==Trip to Abiquiu==

We are organizing a trip to lake Abiquiu this weekend. ATTENTION ATTENTION! Drivers (Christa, Fabio, John, Tom and David) will meet at 8:30 tomorrow morning (Saturday), and will go with Christa to town to rent 4 cars. We'll pick the others up at 9:30. Those in Christas car, meet at 9am. See you tomorrow!

Fabio

Friederike

Elena

Mikkel

John

Nona

Abby

Marco

Aleksandra

Jasmeen

Dan

Sandro

Ian (if there is any room)

Vanessa (ditto)

Christa (my car seats 5 including me, but I want to stop by Los Alamos to pick up my dog on the way. That adds ~30 min to the drive. "Christa's Honda has manual transmission. do we need a second driver on the car who can drive a stick shift car?" "Yes"- Christa

1. Christa

2. Xue (though I'm also willing to be a driver if necessary)

3. Katrien

4. Jianfeng Xu

5. Xin

Tom

Nick A

==Bandelier Field Trip==

Bandelier Field Trip
Trip to Bandelier National Monument on Sat. June 9.
We might string a visit to the Valles Caldera and Bradbury Science Museum/Los Alamos in as well. If another group would like to stay around Bandelier, we can split up.

Head over to the [[Bandelier Trip 2012 | Bandelier Trip]] Page to sign up!

==Mafia==

[[JP]] is a huge fan of Mafia/Werewolf. Let's play a game sometime in the lower commons.

Let's meet Saturday evening at 8:00 in the lower commons for our first game.

- [[Ryan_James|Ryan]] is down for this.

- Jasmeen is also a big fan of Mafia.

- Ian has never played, but is interested

- Vikram is interested in learning the game.

- Tom F. would like to join and can also teach "The Resistance" a very similar game

- Katrien wants to play too

==FOOTBALL!==

Anyone up for a friendly game of soccer? We can check out equipment from the gym.

[Team: Continuous!] 
1. [[Piotr Milanowski|Piotr]] 
2. [[Marco Duenas|Marco]] 
3.[[Oleksandr Ivanov|Alex]] 
4. 
5. 
[Team: Discrete!] 
1. [[Fabio Cresto Aleina|Fabio]] 
2. [[Matteo Chinazzi|Matteo]] 
3.[[JP]] 
4. 
5.

Complex Systems Summer School 2012-After Hours

2012-06-14T02:30:28Z

AGomez: /* Trip to Taos */

{{Complex Systems Summer School 2012}}

Use this space to organize your own after hours activities.

==Dancing==
Of particular varieties --

There's a contra on the 23rd; swing dancing most Mondays; this is supposed to be a great tango town, and I'm looking for drop-in-friendly beginner classes...

[http://www.santafenewmexican.com/Sidebar/Dance_fever_in_Santa_Fe swing, salsa, tango]

[http://www.folkmads.org/may_jun_calendar12.html contras, here and ABQ]

We've heard great Appalachian-style folk musicians here already, but I haven't found a ceili or hoedown locally.

--Chloe

==Trip to Taos==

JP and Tom are going to go to Taos on Saturday 6/16. Sights to see will include the High Road to Taos, Taos Pueblo, the Taos Gorge, Taos Earthships, and the plenty of Taos Hippies.
 
Car 1: JP's Camry 

1.[[JP]] 
2.Nick G 
3. 
4. 
5. 
 

Car 2: Tom's Car 
1 Andres G. 
2 
3 
4 

==Trip to Abiquiu==

We are organizing a trip to lake Abiquiu this weekend. Google maps says it should take about 1:10 hour driving from Santa Fe. Who's interested? We'll have to rent cars to go there.

Fabio

Friederike

Elena

Mikkel

John

Nona

Abby

==Saturday Football==

Who is up for a quick match tomorrow at 8am before the Bandelier trip? Let's make it a relaxed, just-for-fun match. Sign up below:

- [[Miguel Lurgi|Miguel]]

==Bandelier Field Trip==

Bandelier Field Trip
Trip to Bandelier National Monument on Sat. June 9.
We might string a visit to the Valles Caldera and Bradbury Science Museum/Los Alamos in as well. If another group would like to stay around Bandelier, we can split up.

Head over to the [[Bandelier Trip 2012 | Bandelier Trip]] Page to sign up!

==Mafia==

[[JP]] is a huge fan of Mafia/Werewolf. Let's play a game sometime in the lower commons.

Let's meet Saturday evening at 8:00 in the lower commons for our first game.

- [[Ryan_James|Ryan]] is down for this.

- Jasmeen is also a big fan of Mafia.

- Ian has never played, but is interested

- Vikram is interested in learning the game.

- Tom F. would like to join and can also teach "The Resistance" a very similar game

- Katrien wants to play too

==FOOTBALL!==

Anyone up for a friendly game of soccer? We can check out equipment from the gym.

[Team: Continuous!] 
1. [[Piotr Milanowski|Piotr]] 
2. [[Marco Duenas|Marco]] 
3.[[Oleksandr Ivanov|Alex]] 
4. 
5. 
[Team: Discrete!] 
1. [[Fabio Cresto Aleina|Fabio]] 
2. [[Matteo Chinazzi|Matteo]] 
3.[[JP]] 
4. 
5.

Innovation Group Project

2012-06-11T04:22:05Z

AGomez: /* from dan */

== Ideas for Innovation Project ==

Please list here your individual ideas for what we might like to work on. At the moment Charlie Brummitt, Gareth Haslam, Daniel Wu, Nicolas Goudemand, Andres Gomez-Lievano, and Jienfang Xu have all expressed an interest. If there is anyone I have missed please let me (GH) know. Everything is still open at the moment so I think we agreed that each person should try and form a research question and then a few details about idea, methods etc. (keep it short). Please use this page to post comments, papers, and other thoughts. Also, please list any particular skills/assets you may have (existing data, software familiarity, programming, game design, graphic design, network construction etc.).

=== Patent data ===
NBER has useful [http://www.nber.org/patents/ patent data] in CVS ASCII format. I (Charlie) just loaded it into ''Mathematica'' and plotted the # patents over time [[File:patents-over-time.pdf]] and # patents per captia over time [[File: patents-per-capita.pdf]]. The latter is roughly constant and might grow somewhat linearly after 1980.

==== From Andres: ====
Apparently, wiki doesn't allow to upload csv files... Do you know a way to upload it somewhere (so we don't have to be sending files by email all the time)?

==== From Jianfeng Xu:====
two papers,

David krakauer derived a "lightspeed" of biology evolution in this paper.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/25540984/CHAOEH213037110_1.pdf

About technology singularity:
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html

some data may be useful at Bela Nagy's website:
http://pcdb.santafe.edu/

== from dan ==
exploring sociotechnical transitions into more environmentally sustainable products
[http://gupea.ub.gu.se/bitstream/2077/26536/1/gupea_2077_26536_1.pdf] (from Andres: I included the external link. Dan had the address without it)

=== Idea 1 ===

Andres Gomez-Lievano

2012-06-09T06:43:30Z

AGomez:

[[File:Mesa-Verde_20110528_006.jpg|left|thumbnail|450px|Me at Mesa Verde National Park]]

My name is Andres Gomez-Lievano, I was born in Bogota, Colombia, almost now 28 years ago. I am about to start my second year in my PhD in Applied Mathematics at Arizona State University.

My general concern is with studying and understanding cities, but I'm very eager to learn about all the other fields and interests that people are bringing to the school.

E-mail: agomez137@gmail.com

==Ideas for projects==
- What are the underlying mechanisms behind innovation? Empirically we know that in metropolitan areas (at least in the US), bigger cities produce more patents per capita than smaller ones. However, we have also data for the number of inventors in a city. Surprinsingly, patents per inventor remains stable. How is it that cities attract (or create) more `inventors'? I have some data of inventors and patents that could be useful to answer some of the questions regarding innovation.

- My previous focus within the topic of cities, was to study crime. I was not interested in the particular instances (for which there are plenty of studies and anecdotes) but rather in the most general and universal patterns that we may be able to find in urban systems regarding homicides (see [http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/12-02-001.pdf this link for part of my work on homicides]). Empirically, given a fixed population size, the distribution of homicides is log-normal. Why?? I have some data of homicides for cities in different countries in Latin America, and I think there is still plenty of room to come up with something new by applying a complex systems approach to crime.

Very far from my own comfort zone:

- I am particularly interested in macroecology. I don't have any background, so I am very interested in learning. I want to understand how does the low-entropy energy of the sun gets transformed and degraded by Earth's ecosystems back into empty space. If biological organisms have evolved somehow to use energy efficiently (i.e. degrading efficiently energy gradients), what does allometric scaling say about this? Can this energy gradient determine the "depth" of the trophic levels? I would like to delve at some point in my life to the understanding of biological evolution from a thermodynamic point of view.

==Previous works and interests==
I did my undergraduate degree in Physics at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota. I became interested very early in my studies in collective systems and so my emphasis was mostly in Statistical Mechanics. My final degree project was about a simple model of a Sandpile in a Scale-free Network, in which I focused in deriving analytically the 'critical exponents'. I became in love of self-organized criticality, scaling and power-laws, which turned into an interest in the topic of `extreme events', disasters and crisis.

In my master degree in Industrial Engineering I became interested in cities. My thesis was about the effects of the fractal makeup of cities (the urban fabric does not fill space homogeneously and has actually an approximate fractal structure) on traffic. The way cities fill space affects its internal street network, which in turn determines to a great extent its internal traffic dynamics; I analysed a very simple computational model to understand the essentials of this phenomenon.

After I finished my master degree, I worked for a year and a half in the Financial Risk Management division of one Colombia's financial companies.

==On a more philosophical side==
It is my opinion that we are in a conceptual crisis in the study of cities, and this also interests me. By now, it is clear to me that many of the approaches taken so far to understand cities and explain their differences have been mostly unsuccessful: we still do not know why some cities flourish and thrive and others do not, why some expand while others stagnate, what are the cities good for, or how exactly does the creation of wealth within them comes about. The problem, from my point of view, is not so much that we lack the data, or that we are dealing with systems composed of human beings, each with unique characteristics and complex behaviors, but rather that our conceptual frameworks are inadequate. This inability to have successful theories is, for me, a manifestation that we have been dealing with a wrong set of concepts (to say which ones is also unclear). And no matter how hard we try or how sophisticated we might become, if we are dealing with the wrong concepts to explain a phenomenon, that phenomenon is going to remain unexplained.

It has been recognized for some while now that cities should be understood as 'processes' rather than 'objects'. But thinking of them as processes does not change the fact that we still think of them as actual physical and well defined objects. And in doing so, for example, we assign particular people to particular cities to count their populations, and we create geographical boundaries (political or economical), to construct our urban quantities. I want to challenge that notion. I do not see cities as physical constructions, but rather as abstract social ones. This social construction do manifests itself physically, and indeed we should quantify those manifestations. But I think we should bear in mind that each person has different "degrees of belonging" to different cities, and that there is a continuum between rural and urban areas.

So in the long term, I would like to help develop a different conceptual framework from which we can understand better the urban phenomenon.

Innovation Group Project

2012-06-07T04:10:57Z

AGomez:

Innovation Group Project

2012-06-07T03:51:10Z

AGomez:

Bandelier Trip 2012

2012-06-07T03:34:40Z

AGomez: /* Charlie's car: 2 seats */

{{Complex Systems Summer School 2012}}

Please sign up here so we know who's going. 
Also: If you have a car, please let us know. The more cars, the more people. 

We'll meet Saturday at 10:00am in the parking circle.

Please remember to bring a hat, sunscreen, water, hiking shoes, and anything else you'll need for a day out in the field.

==Cars:==

===Tom's Sedan: 4 seats===
1. [[Nicholas Allgaier]] 

2. Vikram Vijayaraghavan 

3. Katrien Beuls 

4. Riccardo Fusaroli 

===John Paul's Camry: 4 (maybe 5) seats===

1. [[John Paul]] 

2. [[Matteo Chinazzi]] 

3. [[Chloe Lewis]] 

4. [[Xue Feng]] 

5. [[Joanne Rodrigues]] 

===Juniper's Car: 4 seats===

1. Jasmeen Kanwal

2. Sarah Tweedt

3. Mark Longo

4. Hide Inamine

===[http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/events/workshops/index.php/Christa_Brelsford Christa]'s Car: 4 (maybe 5) seats===

1. Christa

2. Nicolas Goudemand

3. Marco

4. [http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/events/workshops/index.php/Xin_Lu Xin]

5(middle seat in a 2 door civic). [[Miguel Lurgi]]

===Charlie's car: 2 seats ===
My car's not that useful for this trip because I took out so many of the seats. I have only two seats besides the driver seat. Better than nothing.

1. Andres Gomez-Lievano

2.

===STILL NEEDS A SEAT!===
1. Priya Subramanian

2. [[Piotr Milanowski | Piotr]]

3. Georg M Goerg

4. Oleksandr Ivanov

5. Ben Althouse

6. Georg Weber

7. Oscar Patterson

8. David Pugh

9. Abby Horn

Alfred Hubler's Nonlinear Dynamics Lab 2012

2012-06-06T06:47:32Z

AGomez: /* Friday, June 8 7:00am */

{{Complex Systems Summer School 2012}}

==Thursday, June 7, 6:00pm==

1. Sarah Tweedt 
2. Georg F. Weber 
3. Georg M. Goerg 
4. Cameron Smith 
5. Mikkel Vestergaard 
6. Friederike Greb 
7. Fabio Cresto Aleina 
8. Benji zusman 
9. Elena del Val 
10.Riccardo Fusaroli 
11. Nick Allgaier 
12.John Long 
13. Sepehr Ehsani 
14. David Pugh 
15.Keegan Hines 
16.Sanith 

==Friday, June 8 7:00am==
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS AN EARLY MORNING CLASS! 
1. Matteo Chinazzi 
2. Nona Karalashvili 
3. Xin Lu 
4. Joanne Rodrigues 
5. Chloe Lewis 
6. Seth Frey 
7. Graham Sack 
8. Piotr Milanowski 
9. Andres Gomez-Lievano 
10. 
11. 
12. 
13. 
14. 
15. 

==Monday, June 11, 6:00pm==
1. Hidetoshi Inamine 
2. Dan Wu 
3. Xiaoli Dong 
4. Si Tang 
5. Abby Horn 
6. Xue Feng 
7. Priya Subramanian 
8. Oscar Patterson 
9. Vanessa Ferdinand 
10.Tom Fennewald 
11.Jianfeng Xu 
12.Nicolas Goudemand 
13.Katrien Beuls 
14.Charlie Brummitt 
15.Ben Althouse 

==Tuesday, June 12, 6:00pm==
1. Marco Duenas

2. Jasmeen Kanwal 
3. shawana Wilson 
4. Miguel Lurgi 
5.Vikram Vijayaraghavan 
6.Mark Longo 
7.Oleksandr Ivanov 
8.Jon Stoffel 
9. Daniel Strombom 
10. 
11. 
12. 
13. 
14. 
15.

Andres Gomez-Lievano

2012-06-05T03:28:28Z

AGomez:

[[File:Mesa-Verde_20110528_006.jpg|left|thumbnail|450px|Me at Mesa Verde National Park]]

My name is Andres Gomez-Lievano, I was born in Bogota, Colombia, almost now 28 years ago. I am about to start my second year in my PhD in Applied Mathematics at Arizona State University.

My general concern is with studying and understanding cities, but I'm very eager to learn about all the other fields and interests that people are bringing to the school.

==Ideas for projects==
- What are the underlying mechanisms behind innovation? Empirically we know that in metropolitan areas (at least in the US), bigger cities produce more patents per capita than smaller ones. However, we have also data for the number of inventors in a city. Surprinsingly, patents per inventor remains stable. How is it that cities attract (or create) more `inventors'? I have some data of inventors and patents that could be useful to answer some of the questions regarding innovation.

- My previous focus within the topic of cities, was to study crime. I was not interested in the particular instances (for which there are plenty of studies and anecdotes) but rather in the most general and universal patterns that we may be able to find in urban systems regarding homicides (see [http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/12-02-001.pdf this link for part of my work on homicides]). Empirically, given a fixed population size, the distribution of homicides is log-normal. Why?? I have some data of homicides for cities in different countries in Latin America, and I think there is still plenty of room to come up with something new by applying a complex systems approach to crime.

Very far from my own comfort zone:

- I am particularly interested in macroecology. I don't have any background, so I am very interested in learning. I want to understand how does the low-entropy energy of the sun gets transformed and degraded by Earth's ecosystems back into empty space. If biological organisms have evolved somehow to use energy efficiently (i.e. degrading efficiently energy gradients), what does allometric scaling say about this? Can this energy gradient determine the "depth" of the trophic levels? I would like to delve at some point in my life to the understanding of biological evolution from a thermodynamic point of view.

==Previous works and interests==
I did my undergraduate degree in Physics at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota. I became interested very early in my studies in collective systems and so my emphasis was mostly in Statistical Mechanics. My final degree project was about a simple model of a Sandpile in a Scale-free Network, in which I focused in deriving analytically the 'critical exponents'. I became in love of self-organized criticality, scaling and power-laws, which turned into an interest in the topic of `extreme events', disasters and crisis.

In my master degree in Industrial Engineering I became interested in cities. My thesis was about the effects of the fractal makeup of cities (the urban fabric does not fill space homogeneously and has actually an approximate fractal structure) on traffic. The way cities fill space affects its internal street network, which in turn determines to a great extent its internal traffic dynamics; I analysed a very simple computational model to understand the essentials of this phenomenon.

After I finished my master degree, I worked for a year and a half in the Financial Risk Management division of one Colombia's financial companies.

==On a more philosophical side==
It is my opinion that we are in a conceptual crisis in the study of cities, and this also interests me. By now, it is clear to me that many of the approaches taken so far to understand cities and explain their differences have been mostly unsuccessful: we still do not know why some cities flourish and thrive and others do not, why some expand while others stagnate, what are the cities good for, or how exactly does the creation of wealth within them comes about. The problem, from my point of view, is not so much that we lack the data, or that we are dealing with systems composed of human beings, each with unique characteristics and complex behaviors, but rather that our conceptual frameworks are inadequate. This inability to have successful theories is, for me, a manifestation that we have been dealing with a wrong set of concepts (to say which ones is also unclear). And no matter how hard we try or how sophisticated we might become, if we are dealing with the wrong concepts to explain a phenomenon, that phenomenon is going to remain unexplained.

It has been recognized for some while now that cities should be understood as 'processes' rather than 'objects'. But thinking of them as processes does not change the fact that we still think of them as actual physical and well defined objects. And in doing so, for example, we assign particular people to particular cities to count their populations, and we create geographical boundaries (political or economical), to construct our urban quantities. I want to challenge that notion. I do not see cities as physical constructions, but rather as abstract social ones. This social construction do manifests itself physically, and indeed we should quantify those manifestations. But I think we should bear in mind that each person has different "degrees of belonging" to different cities, and that there is a continuum between rural and urban areas.

So in the long term, I would like to help develop a different conceptual framework from which we can understand better the urban phenomenon.

Andres Gomez-Lievano

2012-06-05T03:05:34Z

AGomez:

[[File:Mesa-Verde_20110528_006.jpg|left|thumbnail|450px|Me at Mesa Verde National Park]]

My name is Andres Gomez-Lievano, I was born in Bogota, Colombia, almost now 28 years ago. I am about to start my second year in my PhD in Applied Mathematics at Arizona State University.

My general concern is with studying and understanding cities, but I'm very eager to learn about all the other fields and interests that people are bringing to the school.

==Ideas for projects==
- What are the underlying mechanisms behind innovation? Empirically we know that in metropolitan areas (at least in the US), bigger cities produce more patents per capita than smaller ones. However, we have also data for the number of inventors in a city. Surprinsingly, patents per inventor remains stable. How is it that cities attract (or create) more `inventors'? I have some data of inventors and patents that could be useful to answer some of the questions regarding innovation.

- My previous focus within the topic of cities, was to study crime. I was not interested in the particular instances (for which there are plenty of studies and anecdotes) but rather in the most general and universal patterns that we may be able to find in urban systems regarding homicides (see http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/12-02-001.pdf for part of my work). Empirically, given a fixed population size, the distribution of homicides is log-normal. Why?? I have some data of homicides for cities in different countries in Latin America, and I think there is still plenty of room to come up with something new by applying a complex systems approach to crime.

Very far from my own comfort zone:

- I am particularly interested in macroecology. I don't have any background, so I am very interested in learning. I want to understand how does the low-entropy energy of the sun gets transformed and degraded by Earth's ecosystems back into empty space. If biological organisms have evolved somehow to use energy efficiently (i.e. degrading efficiently energy gradients), what does allometric scaling say about this? Can this energy gradient determine the "depth" of the trophic levels? I would like to delve at some point in my life to the understanding of biological evolution from a thermodynamic point of view.

==Previous works and interests==
I did my undergraduate degree in Physics at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota. I became interested very early in my studies in collective systems and so my emphasis was mostly in Statistical Mechanics. My final degree project was about a simple model of a Sandpile in a Scale-free Network, in which I focused in deriving analytically the 'critical exponents'. I became in love of self-organized criticality, scaling and power-laws, which turned into an interest in the topic of `extreme events', disasters and crisis.

In my master degree in Industrial Engineering I became interested in cities. My thesis was about the effects of the fractal makeup of cities (the urban fabric does not fill space homogeneously and has actually an approximate fractal structure) on traffic. The way cities fill space affects its internal street network, which in turn determines to a great extent its internal traffic dynamics; I analysed a very simple computational model to understand the essentials of this phenomenon.

After I finished my master degree, I worked for a year and a half in the Financial Risk Management division of one Colombia's financial companies.

==On a more philosophical side==
It is my opinion that we are in a conceptual crisis in the study of cities, and this also interests me. By now, it is clear to me that many of the approaches taken so far to understand cities and explain their differences have been mostly unsuccessful: we still do not know why some cities flourish and thrive and others do not, why some expand while others stagnate, what are the cities good for, or how exactly does the creation of wealth within them comes about. The problem, from my point of view, is not so much that we lack the data, or that we are dealing with systems composed of human beings, each with unique characteristics and complex behaviors, but rather that our conceptual frameworks are inadequate. This inability to have successful theories is, for me, a manifestation that we have been dealing with a wrong set of concepts (to say which ones is also unclear). And no matter how hard we try or how sophisticated we might become, if we are dealing with the wrong concepts to explain a phenomenon, that phenomenon is going to remain unexplained.

It has been recognized for some while now that cities should be understood as 'processes' rather than 'objects'. But thinking of them as processes does not change the fact that we still think of them as actual physical and well defined objects. And in doing so, for example, we assign particular people to particular cities to count their populations, and we create geographical boundaries (political or economical), to construct our urban quantities. I want to challenge that notion. I do not see cities as physical constructions, but rather as abstract social ones. This social construction do manifests itself physically, and indeed we should quantify those manifestations. But I think we should bear in mind that each person has different "degrees of belonging" to different cities, and that there is a continuum between rural and urban areas.

So in the long term, I would like to help develop a different conceptual framework from which we can understand better the urban phenomenon.

Andres Gomez-Lievano

2012-06-05T02:50:17Z

AGomez:

[[File:Mesa-Verde_20110528_006.jpg|left|thumbnail|400px|Me at Mesa Verde National Park]]

My name is Andres Gomez-Lievano, I was born in Bogota, Colombia, almost now 28 years ago. I am about to start my second year in my PhD in Applied Mathematics at Arizona State University.

My general concern is with studying and understanding cities, but I'm very eager to learn about all the other fields and interests that people are bringing to the school.

==Ideas for projects==
- What are the underlying mechanisms behind innovation? Empirically we know that in metropolitan areas (at least in the US), bigger cities produce more patents per capita than smaller ones. However, we have also data for the number of inventors in a city. Surprinsingly, patents per inventor remains stable. How is it that cities attract (or create) more `inventors'? I have some data of inventors and patents that could be useful to answer some of the questions regarding innovation.

- My previous focus within the topic of cities, was to study crime. I was not interested in the particular instances (for which there are plenty of studies and anecdotes) but rather in the most general and universal patterns that we may be able to find in urban systems regarding homicides (see http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/12-02-001.pdf for part of my work). Empirically, given a fixed population size, the distribution of homicides is log-normal. Why?? I have some data of homicides for cities in different countries in Latin America, and I think there is still plenty of room to come up with something new by applying a complex systems approach to crime.

Very far from my own comfort zone:

- I am particularly interested in macroecology. I don't have any background, so I am very interested in learning. I want to understand how does the low-entropy energy of the sun gets transformed and degraded by Earth's ecosystems back into empty space. If biological organisms have evolved somehow to use energy efficiently (i.e. degrading efficiently energy gradients), what does allometric scaling say about this? Can this energy gradient determine the "depth" of the trophic levels? I would like to delve at some point in my life to the understanding of biological evolution from a thermodynamic point of view.

==Previous works and interests==
I did my undergraduate degree in Physics at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota. I became interested very early in my studies in collective systems and so my emphasis was mostly in Statistical Mechanics. My final degree project was about a simple model of a Sandpile in a Scale-free Network, in which I focused in deriving analytically the 'critical exponents'. I became in love of self-organized criticality, scaling and power-laws, which turned into an interest in the topic of `extreme events', disasters and crisis.

In my master degree in Industrial Engineering I became interested in cities. My thesis was about the effects of the fractal makeup of cities (the urban fabric does not fill space homogeneously and has actually an approximate fractal structure) on traffic. The way cities fill space affects its internal street network, which in turn determines to a great extent its internal traffic dynamics; I analysed a very simple computational model to understand the essentials of this phenomenon.

After I finished my master degree, I worked for a year and a half in the Financial Risk Management division of one Colombia's financial companies.

Andres Gomez-Lievano

2012-06-05T02:46:29Z

AGomez: /* Previous works and interests */

[[File:Mesa-Verde_20110528_006.jpg|left|thumbnail|Me at Mesa Verde National Park]]

My name is Andres Gomez-Lievano, I was born in Bogota, Colombia, almost now 28 years ago. I am about to start my second year in my PhD in Applied Mathematics at Arizona State University.

My general concern is with studying and understanding cities, but I'm very eager to learn about all the other fields and interests that people are bringing to the school.

==Ideas for projects==
- What are the underlying mechanisms behind innovation? Empirically we know that in metropolitan areas (at least in the US), bigger cities produce more patents per capita than smaller ones. However, we have also data for the number of inventors in a city. Surprinsingly, patents per inventor remains stable. How is it that cities attract (or create) more `inventors'? I have some data of inventors and patents that could be useful to answer some of the questions regarding innovation.

- My previous focus within the topic of cities, was to study crime. I was not interested in the particular instances (for which there are plenty of studies and anecdotes) but rather in the most general and universal patterns that we may be able to find in urban systems regarding homicides (see http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/12-02-001.pdf for part of my work). Empirically, given a fixed population size, the distribution of homicides is log-normal. Why?? I have some data of homicides for cities in different countries in Latin America, and I think there is still plenty of room to come up with something new by applying a complex systems approach to crime.

Very far from my own comfort zone:

- I am particularly interested in macroecology. I don't have any background, so I am very interested in learning. I want to understand how does the low-entropy energy of the sun gets transformed and degraded by Earth's ecosystems back into empty space. If biological organisms have evolved somehow to use energy efficiently (i.e. degrading efficiently energy gradients), what does allometric scaling say about this? Can this energy gradient determine the "depth" of the trophic levels? I would like to delve at some point in my life to the understanding of biological evolution from a thermodynamic point of view.

==Previous works and interests==
I did my undergraduate degree in Physics at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota. I became interested very early in my studies in collective systems and so my emphasis was mostly in Statistical Mechanics. My final degree project was about a simple model of a Sandpile in a Scale-free Network, in which I focused in deriving analytically the 'critical exponents'. I became in love of self-organized criticality, scaling and power-laws, which turned into an interest in the topic of `extreme events', disasters and crisis.

In my master degree in Industrial Engineering I became interested in cities. My thesis was about the effects of the fractal makeup of cities (the urban fabric does not fill space homogeneously and has actually an approximate fractal structure) on traffic. The way cities fill space affects its internal street network, which in turn determines to a great extent its internal traffic dynamics; I analysed a very simple computational model to understand the essentials of this phenomenon.

After I finished my master degree, I worked for a year and a half in the Financial Risk Management division of one Colombia's financial companies.

Andres Gomez-Lievano

2012-06-05T02:45:03Z

AGomez: /* Ideas for projects */

[[File:Mesa-Verde_20110528_006.jpg|left|thumbnail|Me at Mesa Verde National Park]]

My name is Andres Gomez-Lievano, I was born in Bogota, Colombia, almost now 28 years ago. I am about to start my second year in my PhD in Applied Mathematics at Arizona State University.

My general concern is with studying and understanding cities, but I'm very eager to learn about all the other fields and interests that people are bringing to the school.

==Ideas for projects==
- What are the underlying mechanisms behind innovation? Empirically we know that in metropolitan areas (at least in the US), bigger cities produce more patents per capita than smaller ones. However, we have also data for the number of inventors in a city. Surprinsingly, patents per inventor remains stable. How is it that cities attract (or create) more `inventors'? I have some data of inventors and patents that could be useful to answer some of the questions regarding innovation.

- My previous focus within the topic of cities, was to study crime. I was not interested in the particular instances (for which there are plenty of studies and anecdotes) but rather in the most general and universal patterns that we may be able to find in urban systems regarding homicides (see http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/12-02-001.pdf for part of my work). Empirically, given a fixed population size, the distribution of homicides is log-normal. Why?? I have some data of homicides for cities in different countries in Latin America, and I think there is still plenty of room to come up with something new by applying a complex systems approach to crime.

Very far from my own comfort zone:

- I am particularly interested in macroecology. I don't have any background, so I am very interested in learning. I want to understand how does the low-entropy energy of the sun gets transformed and degraded by Earth's ecosystems back into empty space. If biological organisms have evolved somehow to use energy efficiently (i.e. degrading efficiently energy gradients), what does allometric scaling say about this? Can this energy gradient determine the "depth" of the trophic levels? I would like to delve at some point in my life to the understanding of biological evolution from a thermodynamic point of view.

==Previous works and interests==
I did my undergraduate degree in Physics at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota. I became interested very early in my studies in collective systems and so my emphasis was mostly in Statistical Mechanics. My final degree project was about a simple model of a Sandpile model in a Scale-free Network, in which I focused in deriving analytically the 'critical exponents'. I became in love of self-organized criticality, scaling and power-laws, which turned into an interest in the topic of `extreme events', disasters and crisis.

In my master degree in Industrial Engineering I became interested in cities. My thesis was about the effects of the fractal makeup of cities (the urban fabric does not fill space homogeneously and has actually an approximate fractal structure) on traffic. The way cities fill space affects its internal street network, which in turn determines to a great extent its internal traffic dynamics; I analysed a very simple computational model to understand the essentials of this phenomenon.

After I finished my master degree, I worked for a year and a half in the Financial Risk Management division of one Colombia's financial companies.

Andres Gomez-Lievano

2012-06-05T02:43:38Z

AGomez:

[[File:Mesa-Verde_20110528_006.jpg|left|thumbnail|Me at Mesa Verde National Park]]

My name is Andres Gomez-Lievano, I was born in Bogota, Colombia, almost now 28 years ago. I am about to start my second year in my PhD in Applied Mathematics at Arizona State University.

My general concern is with studying and understanding cities, but I'm very eager to learn about all the other fields and interests that people are bringing to the school.

==Ideas for projects==
- What are the underlying mechanisms behind innovation? Empirically we know that in metropolitan areas (at least in the US), bigger cities produce more patents per capita than smaller ones. However, we have also data for the number of inventors in a city. Surprinsingly, patents per inventor remains stable. How is it that cities attract (or create) more `inventors'? I have some data of inventors and patents that could be useful to answer some of the questions regarding innovation.

- My previous focus within the topic of cities, was to study crime. I was not interested in the particular instances (for which there are plenty of studies and anecdotes) but rather in the most general and universal patterns that we may be able to find in urban systems regarding homicides (see http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/12-02-001.pdf for part of my work). Empirically, given a fixed population size, the distribution of homicides is log-normal. Why?? I have some data of homicides for cities in different countries in Latin America, and I think there is still plenty of room to come up with something new by applying a complex systems approach to crime.

Very far from my own confort zone:

- I am particularly interested in macroecology. I don't have any background, so I am very interested in learning. I want to understand how does the low-entropy energy of the sun gets transformed and degraded by Earth's ecosystems back into empty space. If biological organisms have evolved somehow to use energy efficiently (i.e. degrading efficiently energy gradients), what does allometric scaling say about this? Can this energy gradient determine the "depth" of the trophic levels? I would like to delve at some point in my life to the understanding of biological evolution from a thermodynamic point of view.

==Previous works and interests==
I did my undergraduate degree in Physics at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota. I became interested very early in my studies in collective systems and so my emphasis was mostly in Statistical Mechanics. My final degree project was about a simple model of a Sandpile model in a Scale-free Network, in which I focused in deriving analytically the 'critical exponents'. I became in love of self-organized criticality, scaling and power-laws, which turned into an interest in the topic of `extreme events', disasters and crisis.

In my master degree in Industrial Engineering I became interested in cities. My thesis was about the effects of the fractal makeup of cities (the urban fabric does not fill space homogeneously and has actually an approximate fractal structure) on traffic. The way cities fill space affects its internal street network, which in turn determines to a great extent its internal traffic dynamics; I analysed a very simple computational model to understand the essentials of this phenomenon.

After I finished my master degree, I worked for a year and a half in the Financial Risk Management division of one Colombia's financial companies.

File:Mesa-Verde 20110528 006.jpg

2012-06-05T02:34:13Z

AGomez:

Andres Gomez-Lievano

2012-06-05T02:24:29Z

AGomez: Created page with 'My name is Andres Gomez-Lievano, I was born in Bogota, Colombia, almost now 28 years ago. I am about to start my second year in my PhD in Applied Mathematics at Arizona State Uni…'

My name is Andres Gomez-Lievano, I was born in Bogota, Colombia, almost now 28 years ago. I am about to start my second year in my PhD in Applied Mathematics at Arizona State University.

My general concern is with studying and understanding cities, but I'm very eager to learn about all the other fields and interests that people are bringing to the school.

==Ideas for projects==
- What are the underlying mechanisms behind innovation? Empirically we know that in metropolitan areas (at least in the US), bigger cities produce more patents per capita than smaller ones. However, we have also data for the number of inventors in a city. Surprinsingly, patents per inventor remains stable. How is it that cities attract (or create) more `inventors'? I have some data of inventors and patents that could be useful to answer some of the questions regarding innovation.

- My previous focus within the topic of cities, was to study crime. I was not interested in the particular instances (for which there are plenty of studies and anecdotes) but rather in the most general and universal patterns that we may be able to find in urban systems regarding homicides (see http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/12-02-001.pdf for part of my work). Empirically, given a fixed population size, the distribution of homicides is log-normal. Why?? I have some data of homicides for cities in different countries in Latin America, and I think there is still plenty of room to come up with something new by applying a complex systems approach to crime.

Very far from my own confort zone:

- I am particularly interested in macroecology. I don't have any background, so I am very interested in learning. I want to understand how does the low-entropy energy of the sun gets transformed and degraded by Earth's ecosystems back into empty space. If biological organisms have evolved somehow to use energy efficiently (i.e. degrading efficiently energy gradients), what does allometric scaling say about this? Can this energy gradient determine the "depth" of the trophic levels? I would like to delve at some point in my life to the understanding of biological evolution from a thermodynamic point of view.

==Previous works and interests==
I did my undergraduate degree in Physics at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota. I became interested very early in my studies in collective systems and so my emphasis was mostly in Statistical Mechanics. My final degree project was about a simple model of a Sandpile model in a Scale-free Network, in which I focused in deriving analytically the 'critical exponents'. I became in love of self-organized criticality, scaling and power-laws, which turned into an interest in the topic of `extreme events', disasters and crisis.

In my master degree in Industrial Engineering I became interested in cities. My thesis was about the effects of the fractal makeup of cities (the urban fabric does not fill space homogeneously and has actually an approximate fractal structure) on traffic. The way cities fill space affects its internal street network, which in turn determines to a great extent its internal traffic dynamics; I analysed a very simple computational model to understand the essentials of this phenomenon.

After I finished my master degree, I worked for a year and a half in the Financial Risk Management division of one Colombia's financial companies.