CSSS 2009 Santa Fe-Tutorials

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Feel free to organize your own tutorials.
Post tutorial schedules here.

Maximum Entropy (and maybe maximum entropy production)

Steven Lade: Well, nobody responded to my request so perhaps I'll do it myself :) I learnt a little at another summer school, so maybe I'm the best qualified, I was just hoping I wasn't. :)

Maximum entropy comes out of information theory (which I'm not expert in, so if there's someone knowledgeable to help me there, that would be great). It states simply that the most likely state of a system is the one which maximises its (information-theoretic) entropy. The entropy of statistical mechanics comes naturally from it: indeed, stat mech can be viewed as a subset of information theory from this perspective. But you can apply it to any sort of system, not just physics. For instance, you can easily obtain scaling laws in ecological systems. It's the closest thing to a 'theory of complex systems' that I've seen!

Tentative time: 7PM, Monday June 15. Add your name if interested.

• I am interested and will happily wear the skeptic hat: essentially if the entropy is sensitive to your parametrization, it loses much of its meaning. I think this is why some people (such as Amari) like to do "coordinate-free statistics". -Gustavo Lacerda

• I'm no expert, but I do have information theory basics under my belt... and more importantly, I happen to have some introductory info. theo. latex slides for a talk I recently gave. So I can offer help with the background, and then sit back & listen to the higher level, post-Shannon applications :) -Rosemary Braun
  • On edit: I just noticed Lucas & Roozbeh requested an info theo tutorial -- shall we just roll it all together? -Rosemary Braun

MATLAB / Mathematica

Steven Lade: Hiro, I will happily give a tutorial on the basics of these languages (but only the basics, I don't use any of the fancy bits). Anyone here know if the labs here run MATLAB/Mathematica?

If there is anyone else interested (leave your name) I'll arrange a time, otherwise I'll talk directly with you Hiro.

Karen Simpson: I would also like a tutorial on MATLAB. I know some things about it, but never really learned the basics so it takes me a long time to do things. The computer labs should be equipped with MATLAB. I also have a fairly updated version on my laptop.

Lucas LacasaI'm also interested! Also know some basics but I usually program in Fortran so I'd love to learn it.

Steven, many thanks! I think that the computers in the lab have MATLAB. If not, we can access it through my school's server as long as the internet connection is stable. Hirotoshi Yoshioka/lakiaypayaska

Brian Hollar I'm also very interested! I've never used these languages, but have some basic knowledge of Java, NetLogo, and FORTRAN. I'd appreciate the help and would love to learn.

Statistical physics: applications to complex systems

Lucas Lacasa:Statistical physics is a rather huge field, so I'm thinking on building a tutorial that focus on some specific topics related to complexity science in a chat-like level, namely:

- Fundamentals of statistical mechanics: ensembles, partition function and associated thermodynamic quantities (free energy, entropy) and some other basic stuff.

- Critical phenomena: Phase transitions in physical, social, and algorithmic systems. Self-organized criticality as the counterpart of a critical phase transition. Relation between phase transitions and local bifurcations of dynamical systems.

- Monte Carlo simulations, ergodic theorem

- Specific example gathering all of the above: Ising model

- Other related topics that you may like to listen to

Maybe we could schedule it for next week, something like next wednesday (17) at 7pm? (provided that no PRIORITY things such as basketball or soccer games are scheduled). If anyone else is interested please leave your name. Depending on the 'audience' we can fix one place or another...

• Steven Lade Fantastic, I'm in. But there is the 'Music on the Hill' 6-8pm Wednesdays. Is 8pm getting too late for 'work'? Or I miss an hour of the music. (Tuesday and thursdays there's the nonlinear dynamics labs)

Tutorial requests!

Either a formal 'lecture' or a casual 'chat' is fine!

• Time series analysis (requested by Steve Lade)
• Maximum entropy / Maximum entropy production (requested by Steve Lade)
• Mathematical modelling in ecology (requested by Steve Lade)
• Some physics stuff: statistical mechanics; mean field theory; self-organized criticality and phase transitions; Ising model and the like (requested by Mareen Hofmann and Roozbeh Daneshvar)
  • Lucas Lacasa I can talk you about phase transitions, Ising model, SOC and general stat phys...
  • Steven Lade I'd like to hear about this too; can you schedule a tutorial?
• Evolutionary game theory (requested by Mareen Hofmann and Roozbeh Daneshvar)
• Ergodic theory (requested by Roozbeh Daneshvar)
• Information theory (requested by Roozbeh Daneshvar and Lucas Lacasa)
• Spectral graph theory (requested by Lucas Lacasa)
• Spin glass theory: Replica method (requested by Lucas Lacasa)

• If somebody can give a tutorial on Matlab and/or Mathematica, that would be nice. I'm also interested in the difference between the two programs (e.g., what each program is good at). Thanks in advance! Hiro/lakiaypayaska