Complex Systems Summer School 2012-Projects & Working Groups
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Complex Systems Summer School 2012 |
- nonequilibrium game theory --- my plan is to adapt some SFI-based models, by people like Crutchfield and Farmer, so that they will quantitatively or qualitatively reproduce features of real human data. Meet Seth Frey at dinner on Thursday and Friday.
- Enzyme kinetics – Do enzymes just accelerate equilibrium or play an active role in chemical reactions?
Enzyme networks (e.g. glycolysis) and catalysts in complex mixtures (e.g. Belusov-Zhabotinski reaction) can profoundly influence the outcome of a chemical reaction system. What about a single enzyme? Biochemistry textbooks uniformly say that an enzyme accelerates a reaction without altering its outcome. Yet, the set of differential equations that generically describes enzyme catalysis has remarkable resemblance to the Roessler equations (a textbook example of a non-linear, complex system). With a fixed substrate input or a steady substrate flow, a single enzyme probably cannot affect the reaction outcome. However, sinusoidal or pulsating substrate input, substrate activation or product inhibition, coupling of two enzymes could turn the reaction pattern non-linear. For this project, the sets of equations to study are quite well established – they need to be analyzed. In contrast to some of the more ambitious ideas circulated, this task is exhaustively doable in less than four weeks. I am Georg Weber. If you are interested in studying this problem, please find me on Tuesday over lunch or dinner (or talk to me at any other unstructured time).
- Traffic pattern analysis - Can we estimate car velocity by only observing car counts?
Imagine you have a monitored highway section with a start and end point. At both points you count the number of cars that pass by. The question I'd like to answer / simulate / estimate is: can we make some inference about the velocity of cars although we only have their counts? This would be very useful from an engineering / economic perspective because it's much easier / cheaper to count cars instead of actually tracking them from A to B. I have some intuition about how to go about this, but these are purely statistical (think of it as birth and death process). I would like to see if using more physical modeling of motion and agent-based modeling of traffic flow could shed some more light on this problem. If you are interested in this topic let me know (me = Georg M. Goerg). Let's say Wednesday for lunch or any other time you see me around.
- next idea here