Habiballah Talavatifard

Hi! I am studying 'complex adaptive systems' at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. My background is control engineering; however, I consider myself more a physicist than an engineer. Currently I am working on the problem of modeling and simulation of turbulent fluids using stochastic processes. I am very excited to be at Beijing and looking forward to meet you all. Here go my five questions:

Five Questions:

1. What topics do you have some expertise in and would you be willing to help others learn them?

I have a fair knowledge in nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory. I am also familiar with agent-based models. Moreover, I am familiar with control theory as a control engineer. I can help people to master Matlab if needed.

2. What do you want to learn at the CSSS?

I am here to follow two goals: First, go out form my shell and look at the complex systems discipline from a broader perspective. Second, become deep in some particular subjects. For example, I am very interested to learn about non-equilibrium thermodynamics.

3. Do you have any projects or research interests that would benefit from an interdisciplinary approach?

I am interested in the problem of dynamical hierarchies – the search for hierarchical organization in a complex system. I really want to know what a ‘dynamical hierarchy’ exactly means in different fields. That way I may better understand how viable the approach to this problem is.

4. Do you have any ideas for what sort of project you would like to do this summer?

I am open to participate in any interesting enough projects - even though unrelated to my field. I also have my own suggestion:

To search for Markovian dynamics in a carefully designed complex system and to see whether we find dynamical hierarchies in our system or not. This can be a very tedious task but we may do it in a simplified system like cellular automata. I am sure we can learn a lot from this project.

5. Suppose you could travel one-hundred years in the future and ask researchers any three questions. What would those questions be?

a) Did we finally discover a successful theory of everything?

b) Were we able to finally model the human cognition? Where does consciousness come from?

c) Did complexity theory (I am not sure if we may call it a theory) finally turn into a well-defined mathematical theory rather than a set of tools?

I bet that the answer to 2 of this 3 questions will be yes, and one will be no. Guess which one!

Habib.