Register now for SFI's 2015 Short Course — Exploring Complexity in Social Systems and Economics — August 25-27 in Santa Fe.
Whether they are groups of interacting ants, humans, companies, cities, or societies, social systems are intrinsically complex. How do such systems organize themselves to produce sophisticated collective behavior? How do they adapt and learn in the face of changing circumstances? How does group cooperation emerge from social yet selfish individuals, and how can such cooperation be fostered? What causes social systems, including economies, to fail or collapse, and what makes them resilient?
By approaching these and other questions in social science from a complex systems perspective, scientists are beginning to understand and predict social behavior in wholly new ways.
This accessible two-and-a-half-day course will provide an intensive introduction to the field of complexity as it relates to social systems and economics. Via lectures, exercises, and interactive discussions with prominent SFI faculty, you will learn how methods and tools at the forefront of complexity science are being applied to modeling, predicting, and impacting the behavior of social systems across many disciplines.
This course is specifically designed for professionals, faculty, students, and others who are curious to explore and apply ideas from complexity in their own fields. This course has no prerequisites and requires no specific math or science background. Examples of people who will particularly benefit from this course are managers and policy-makers in business, government, and nonprofit organizations; industrial research and development staff; medical, social work, and education professionals; journalists; and university faculty and students in any area of science or social science.
Faculty instructor list: W. Brian Arthur, Robert Axtell, Aaron Clauset, Mirta Galesic, Melanie Mitchell, Rajiv Sethi, Deborah Strumsky, and others (to be announced).
More information about the course can be found here.
Register now here.
For further information about the program, please e-mail education@santafe.edu or visit our website.