Complex Systems Summer School 2013-Projects & Working Groups

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Project proposals

How the ocean can help us heal complex chronic disease

The human body is its own ecosystem -- much like the ocean -- with resilience, hysteresis, synergistic properties, and multi-system dynamics that depend on matrix conditions. We can use our understanding of the ocean and ecosystems to help us heal? Can we model different scales -- an ocean, a human body, and a microbial community -- to explore ecosystem/human/microbial health in a holistic context that depends on shared key elements like flow & trace minerals as building blocks for function? As one example to think about, chronic illnesses like HIV/AIDS or Lyme disease disrupt the immune system and human body functions (e.g., methylation pathways, detox pathways), preventing optimal function that weakens the human body and makes it vulnerable to other infections. It’s a downward spiral of negative feedbacks, analogous to a backed-up, atrophying ocean or estuary that causes fish kills, destroys coral reefs, etc... analogous to microbial communities that shift when environmental/matrix condition change. I suspect our knowledge of the ocean & large ecosystems, which we can see and visualize, can inform new thinking about system dynamics for health & recovery at the scale of a human body and at the scale of individual microbes & microbial communities...

Anyone else interested? – Kristen Honey

GDELT

I'd love to play around with the new Global Data on Events, Location and Tone (GDELT) dataset, which has 200+ million timestamped and geocoded political events. Here's a writeup of it in Foreign Policy -- David

Research Network Formation

I'd be interested in collecting some data from CSSS attendants. Some kind of way to study social network formation. -- Todd

My new crazy idea, inspired by these guys, is doing something with computer vision. Maybe there's a way to photograph sitting arrangements and extract data from that? -- David

Self-consistent networks for socio-economic institutions

Pablo and I started to discuss a project where we could use cross-impact balances (CIB) to investigate the implications of alternative hypotheses for interrelationships between various socio-economic/political factors. We began discussing this from the perspective of testing competing political economic theories to see what types of institutions (e.g. styles and stability of governance) would be self-consistent according to the theories. However, I would be open to other topics, including research questions inspired by GDELT. If there is interest to learn more about the CIB technique, I could put together a tutorial. --Vanessa