New England Complex Systems Institute

Special Meetings:

Working Groups at NECSI

The New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) promotes discussion of vital research problems in the understanding of complex systems. Working groups that meet regularly in organized topical workshops discuss the state of present research and introduce essential questions to be addressed by future research. The working groups that are presently being organized include:

Working group organization
NECSI will coordinate and support the working groups, facilitating the organization of workshops and covering expenses associated with invited visitors. Each working group consists of a core of 8-12 individuals who organize and participate in a series of workshops (e.g. six per year).
The workshop framework is designed to communicate recent progress and promote discourse on central unsolved questions. Additional working groups will be organized as interest warrants. As resources allow, graduate students or post-doctoral fellows will be assigned to working groups.

Format of workshops
The workshops are designed to promote discourse and therefore are dominated by the time allocated for discussion. A workshop that occurs on Friday typically begins in the morning, and continues till evening. Workships that occur on other weekdays begin in the late afternoon and continue after dinner. In either case brief invited presentations designed to introduce the basic concepts and questions are followed by extended discussion. To enable a productive discussion the number of participants is to be limited to 10-20 including the core group, and additional invited participants.

Working groups

Fundamentals: Information mechanics
Time series analysis and prediction
Molecular self-organization
Mind, brain and behavior
Informatics
Evolution
Structure of human organizations
Biomedical complexity

Fundamentals: Information mechanics

- non-equilibrium systems
- physics and computation
- quantum computation and cryptography
- measurement
- cellular automata
- defining complexity

Time series analysis and prediction

- biological and biomedical applications
- financial and economic applications
- linear and non-linear prediction
- reliability measures for prediction
- long-range correlations
- characterization of time series complexity
- deterministic chaos vs. randomness
- biomedical time series for diagnosis
- economic forecasting

Molecular self-organization

- protein folding
- macromolecular dynamics of DNA
- molecular evolution in drug design
(with Evolution)
- micelles and molecular self-assembly
- micelles as targeted drug delivery systems
- dynamics in cellular membranes

Mind, brain and behavior

- large scale structure and interconnections
- representation, association and logic
- personality and temperament
- consciousness
- the psychofunctional role of sleep
- from animal to man: the evolution of mind
(with Evolution)

Informatics

- structuring of information
- information access
- intelligent search agents
- automated abstraction
- distributed information networks
- information commerce

Evolution

- molecular evolution in drug design
(with Molecular self-organization)
- genetic algorithms in software design
- immune system maturation
- from animal to human: the evolution of mind
(with Mind, brain and behavior)
- evolution and adaptation
- evolution of altruism and aggression
- history as evolution or development

Structure of human organizations

- groups, hierarchies and networks
- information flow in organizations
- coordination and control
- process and function
- designing structure for function
- feed-back processes and indirect control
- motivation within an organization
- organizational complexity

Biomedical complexity

- complexity and aging
- mechanisms of neuromuscular dynamics
- biomedical time series for diagnosis
(with Time series analysis and prediction)
- medical data storage, access and security