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CS Graduate Course Descriptions

The Center for the Study of Complex Systems offers a Graduate Certificate in Complex Systems.  Students who wish to enroll can do so by contacting cscs@umich.edu. (Linked course names will take you to the LSA Course Guide page.)

CMPLXSYS 501An Introduction to Complex Systems --- This course covers a broad range of fundamental topics relevant to the study of complex systems. The course work involves weekly readings focus on "classics" in the complex systems literature, in order to give students a broad, general understanding for the variety of work that falls under the rubric of complex systems. Topics to be covered will include evolutionary systems, self-organized criticality, measures of complexity, approaches to modeling complex adaptive systems, and emergence. Authors to be covered include Holland, Axelrod, Kaufmann, Bak, and Gell-Mann. Grading will be based on the participation in the discussions and on two or three term papers.

CMPLXSYS 510 / MATH 550: Introduction to Adaptive Systems --- This course is an introduction to applications and integration of dynamical systems and game theory to model population and ecological dynamics and evolutionary processes. Topics include Lotka-Volterra systems, non-cooperative games, replicator dynamics and genetic mechanisms of selection and mutation, and other adaptive systems.

This course counts toward the 60 credits of math/science required for a Bachelor of Science degree.

CMPLXSYS 511: Theory of Complex Systems --- A math-based introduction to the theory and analysis of complex systems. Methods covered include nonlinear dynamics, both discrete and continuous, chaos theory, stochastic processes, game theory, criticality and fractals, and numerical methods. Examples include population dynamics, evolutionary theory, genetic algorithms, epidemiology, simple models of markets, opinion formation models, and cellular automata.

CMPLXSYS 530: Computer Modelling of Complex Systems --- Introduces students to basic concepts, tools , and issues which arise using computers to model complex systems. Emphasis is placed on the modeling process itself, from model design through implementation to analyzing, documenting, and communicating results. Case studies of computer models of complex systems, including adaptive and non-adaptive complex systems drawn from economics, ecology, immunology, epidemiology, evolutionary biology, political science, and cognitive science.

CMPLXSYS 535/PHYS 508Theory of Social and Technological Networks --- Introduce and develop the mathematical theory of networks, particularly social and technological networks; applications to important network-driven phenomena in epidemiology of human infections and computer viruses, cascading failure in grids, network resilience and opinion formation. Topics covered: experimental studies of social networks, WWW, internet, information, and biological networks.

CMPLXSYS 541/PHYS 541Introduction to Nonlinear Dynamics and the Physics of Complexity --- An introduction to nonlinear science with an elementary treatment from the point of view of the physics of chaos and fractal growth.

 

While the following are 400 level courses, they are open to graduate students and are valid as credit toward the Complex Systems Graduate Certificate:

 

CMPLXSYS 425:  Evolution in Silico While every population of living organisms is evolving, not everything that evolves is alive. Nature’s success at finding innovative solutions to complex problems has inspired many computational implementations of the evolutionary process. Philosophically, this is possible because evolution is itself a substrate neutral process (i.e., evolution can occur regardless of what particular substance makes up the individuals in a population). This fundamental property of evolution creates a deep connection between computational implementations and the biological process responsible for the diversity of life on Earth. We will highlight this connection and the possibility of two-way interdisciplinary discovery through regular readings and discussions. Some of the various implementations of evolution we will learn about include approaches to solve optimization problems, building controllers and/or bodies for robots, and using computational instances of Darwinian evolution to study fundamental questions in biology. 

CMPLXSYS 435: Ecological Networks Networks have revolutionized the way we understand, represent and analyze complex systems. In particular, Ecology has greatly benefited from network theory to analyze the (inherently complex) structure and dynamics of ecological systems. This course introduces fundamental concepts and recent ecological theory on the structure and dynamics of networks composed by species connected via antagonistic (e.g. who eats whom) and/or mutualistic (e.g. plant-pollinator) interactions. These concepts and theories will be introduced via lectures and regular reading of primary literature, and actively learned via individual and group analysis of empirical data, mathematical models and computational tools. We will also elucidate how to use ecological networks to inform real-world problems such as the current environmental crisis.

CMPLXSYS  445:  Introduction to Information Theory for the Natural Sciences --- This course introduces the basic tools of Information Theory. Entropy, Relative Entropy, and Information, and highlights their utility with applications drawn from various disciplines. After introducing the basics of probability theory and information theory, we explore topics including coding, data compression, channel capacity, thermodynamics, population dynamics, gene transcriptions, network science and more.  This course is cross listed with Biophysics and Physics.