5th European Conference on Complex Systems

Scope of ECCS2008

Complexity and Complex Systems Theory are not a unified scientific subject. They involve a large set of scientific and mathematical modeling tools, with applications to statistical inference, clustering & data analysis, biology & bioinformatics, epidemiology, ecology, economics & finance, optimization, physics, computer science, social and market analysis, operations research, communication networks, complex networks, etc.
Such methods are successfully applied to the description of systems made of a large number of elementary components interacting via a complex pattern of local functional connections that correlate and drive the emergence of a non trivial behavior of the system at the global level.
Typical objects of study are adaptive collective entities emerging in one discipline (at a coarse space-time scale) as the result of simpler interactions of elementary components belonging to another discipline (at a finer scale).
Besides offering new ways of answering questions from one science using concepts from another, the theory of complex systems is promoting a new (agent/network-based) language which allows the formulation of novel questions. As such, it requires the growth of a new generation of scientists mastering these new interdisciplinary grammar and syntax.
The ECCS 2008 is meant to reflect and advance these perspectives, boosting the effort towards both new challenges and a towards the unification of a still fragmented language and methodology.
If you whish to contribute to the conference, please follow the instructions for the call for papers and the call for satellite conferences .

The Conference will be divided in four interconnected sessions on topics that include but are not limited to:

1) Economics and Social Sciences

micro & macro economics, financial markets, social dynamics, agent based models, reconstructing social networks, economy on the web, large infrastructure networks and human mobility, territorial dynamics and sustainable development, insuring institutional stability and adaptability, managing sudden social and political changes, emergence of hierarchies, growth patterns, word-of-mouth and belief propagation, (anti-)viral (de-)marketing, economics of environmentally friendly energy, globalization vs localization in wealth, culture, economy, corporate responsibility, policy making, citizenship, mapping scientific communities, preventing and controling negative social / political trends,...

2) Biology and Bioinformatics

biological networks, inference in biology, brain & functionality, ecology and environment preservation, epidemiology and population dynamics, cell biology, ecological dynamic equilibrium, health networks, modelling and computing the dynamics of gene-regulatory networks, spatial organization and the transcription factor/ DNA interaction, evolutionary dynamics and origins of life, metabolic replicators, coevolution, emergence and stability of cooperation and altruism, chemical evolution, origins of language...

3) Computational, Physical and Mathematical Methods

computational and dynamical processes in networks, collective dynamics, games and on-line algorithms, statistical physics of complex systems, network reconstruction, inference algorithms and applications, optimization over networks, emergency scenarios and risk management , avoiding and managing collapse of networks (e.g. supply / credit networks, energy infrastructures),...

4) Information and Communication Technologies

communication technologies and collective thinking, e-society, P2P communities, emergence of hierarchies, health networks, energy networks, mapping scientific communities, key-words auctions, reconstructing hidden communication networks, information propagation by word-of-web, evaluating the evaluators/ recomending the recomendants, key-words auctions