860-0022-00L Complexity and Global Systems Science
| Semester | Spring Semester 2021 |
| Lecturers | D. Helbing, S. Mahajan |
| Periodicity | yearly recurring course |
| Language of instruction | English |
| Comment | Number of participants limited to 50. Prerequisites: solid mathematical skills. Particularly suitable for students of D-ITET, D-MAVT and ISTP |
Courses
| Number | Title | Hours | Lecturers | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 860-0022-00 S | Complexity and Global Systems Science | 2 hrs |
| D. Helbing, S. Mahajan |
Catalogue data
| Abstract | This course discusses complex techno-socio-economic systems, their counter-intuitive behaviors, and how their theoretical understanding empowers us to solve some long-standing problems that are currently bothering the world. |
| Objective | Participants should learn to get an overview of the state of the art in the field, to present it in a well understandable way to an interdisciplinary scientific audience, to develop models for open problems, to analyze them, and to defend their results in response to critical questions. In essence, participants should improve their scientific skills and learn to think scientifically about complex dynamical systems. |
| Content | This course starts with a discussion of the typical and often counter-intuitive features of complex dynamical systems such as self-organization, emergence, (sudden) phase transitions at "tipping points", multi-stability, systemic instability, deterministic chaos, and turbulence. It then discusses phenomena in networked systems such as feedback, side and cascading effects, and the problem of radical uncertainty. The course progresses by demonstrating the relevance of these properties for understanding societal and, at times, global-scale problems such as traffic jams, crowd disasters, breakdowns of cooperation, crime, conflict, social unrests, political revolutions, bubbles and crashes in financial markets, epidemic spreading, and/or "tragedies of the commons" such as environmental exploitation, overfishing, or climate change. Based on this understanding, the course points to possible ways of mitigating techno-socio-economic-environmental problems, and what data science may contribute to their solution. |
| Lecture notes | "Social Self-Organization Agent-Based Simulations and Experiments to Study Emergent Social Behavior" Helbing, Dirk ISBN 978-3-642-24004-1 |
| Literature | Philip Ball Why Society Is A Complex Matter https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783642289996 Globally networked risks and how to respond Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12047 Global Systems Science and Policy Link Managing Complexity: Insights, Concepts, Applications https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783540752608 Further links: http://global-systems-science.org Link Link https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/global-systems-science Further literature will be recommended in the lectures. |
| Prerequisites / Notice | Mathematical skills can be helpful |
Performance assessment
| Performance assessment information (valid until the course unit is held again) | |
Performance assessment as a semester course | |
| ECTS credits | 3 credits |
| Examiners | D. Helbing, S. Mahajan |
| Type | graded semester performance |
| Language of examination | English |
| Repetition | Repetition only possible after re-enrolling for the course unit. |
| Additional information on mode of examination | Students are expected to actively contribute to the lectures if there are sufficiently few participants, each one will have to give a 20 minute presentation on a scientific paper selected together with the lecturer. These papers are typically about mathematical derivations and models related to the lecture. |
Learning materials
| No public learning materials available. | |
| Only public learning materials are listed. |
Groups
| No information on groups available. |
Restrictions
| Places | 50 at the most |
| Waiting list | until 09.03.2021 |
