Habiballah Talavatifard

Hi! I am a graduate student in complex adaptive systems programme at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. My background is control engineering; however I consider myself more a physicist than an engineer now. 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. I also know a little about information theory of complex systems, statistical mechanics, and cognitive robotics. Moreover, I am familiar with control theory as a control engineer. I can also 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, come out form my mathematical 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 discover a successful theory of everything?

b) Did we model the human brain? Where does consciousness come from?

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

Habib.