By Day GreenbergThe Daily Northwestern
The Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems is hosting its second formal Complexity Conference at the Allen Center, with events scheduled for Wednesday and today.
Columbia University Prof. Duncan Watts and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Prof. David Simchi-Levi drew about 90 graduate students and faculty members to Wednesday’s lecture on how chains and networks affect the relationship between suppliers and consumers.
“There is an assumption that if every individual (in a sample) likes Britney Spears, the whole will like Britney Spears,” said Audrey L. Salazar, a McCormick graduate student.
“Complexity seems to be more of a method of analysis or a method of dealing with the fact that … there’s some chaos that is intrinsic to almost every process,” Salazar said.
Complexity is a way of thinking that requires one to understand how all the pieces of a system work in order to understand the system as a whole and vice versa, said McCormick Prof. William Kath, co-director of the three-year-old Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems.
The phenomenon reaches across business and scientific fields and could affect issues ranging from supply and demand to the theory that there are six degrees of separation between strangers.
What could determine if Spears’ next album will fly off the shelves could also help find a cure for cancer, said McCormick Prof. Luis Amaral, who moderated Wednesday’s session and organized last year’s conference.
“People identify targets and get surprised that it doesn’t affect everything,” Amaral said. “(They) imagine that (they’ve) disturbed this gene, now cancer’s not going to happen. … You have to take into consideration all genes and all proteins and all interactions.”
Amaral said using complexity requires finding out what is most important in the research one does and that the degree of that importance might change once the researcher looks at the entire system.
Complexity could also help produce new medicines, Kath said.
“You have to understand how the whole system works,” Kath said. “This is why they do drug testing, because you don’t necessarily know what each drug is going to do. … If you understand all the metabolic reactions in the cell, maybe it can give you a handle on designing better drugs.”
Other applications of the new method include the exploration of creativity and innovation, Kath said. This includes finding the conditions that foster innovation and finding how people would be able to identify innovation or new ideas.
Students were given the chance to submit their research abstracts to compete for a $100 or $300 cash prize and the opportunity to present their work to the conference attendees.
SESP graduate student Paulo Blikstein, McCormick graduate student Dean Malmgren and Oxford University student Serguei Saavedra gave oral presentations Wednesday.
Today’s sessions will cover cortical neural circuits and brain networks and the complex network of firms and markets.
Reach Day Greenberg at [email protected].
