Please visit our video channel to find all of our recordings, organized into playlists.
Most Recent
Complex Systems Seminar Series Presents: "Geometric frustration, self-assembly, mechanics, and pathways to complexity" <---(Click to View Seminar - includes abstract)
Xiaoming Mao, Department of Physics, University of Michigan
Date of Seminar: April 11, 2023
ABSTRACT: Self-organized complex structures in nature, from hierarchical biopolymers to viral capsids and organisms, offer efficiency, adaptability, robustness, and multifunctionality. How are these structures assembled? Can we understand the fundamental principles behind their formation, and assemble similar structures and can we utilize similar mechanisms to program new ... FOR FULL ABSTRACT AND EVENT LISTING CLICK HERE
Complex Systems Seminar Series Presents: "Can Governance be Reconciled with Uncertainty in Machine Learning? Challenges and Opportunities concerning Accountability and Variance" <---(Click to View Seminar - includes abstract)
A. Feder Cooper | PhD Candidate Computer Science | Cornell University
Date of Seminar: March 23, 2023
ABSTRACT: Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) researchers are confronted daily with the reality that our field has become a stand-in in popular discourse for a variety of public anxieties, political debates, and metaphysical questions about human nature and intelligence. Among such weighty topics .... FOR FULL ABSTRACT AND EVENT LISTING CLICK HERE
Complex Systems Seminar Series Presents: "Controlling stochastic biophysical processes, from protein folding to evolution" <---(Click to View Seminar - includes abstract)
Michael Hinczewski | Department of Physics | Case Western Reserve University
Date of Seminar: March 14, 2023
ABSTRACT: The chemical reaction networks that regulate living systems are all stochastic to varying degrees. The resulting randomness affects biological outcomes at multiple scales, from the probability that a single protein molecule successfully finds its folded state to the evolutionary trajectory of a population of cells. Understanding .... FOR FULL ABSTRACT AND EVENT LISTING CLICK HERE
Complex Systems Seminar Series Presents: "Percolation in an antagonistic model of two-species random sequential adsorption" <---(Click to View Seminar - includes abstract)
Robert Ziff | School of Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering | University of Michigan
Date of Seminar: February 14, 2023
ABSTRACT: An important paradigm in non-equilibrium physics is the Random Sequential Adsorption (RSA) problem, where objects adsorb on a surface randomly and one at at time, with the rule that if another object is there already such that an overlap would occur, the attempted adsorption is rejected. This leads to an ever-slowing filling of the surface until,..... FOR FULL ABSTRACT AND EVENT LISTING CLICK HERE
Complex Systems Seminar Series Presents: "Physics of cellular proportions" <---(Click to View Seminar - includes abstract)
Jané Kondev | School of Physics | Brandeis University
Date of Seminar: February 7, 2023
ABSTRACT: Dr. Gulliver noticed 140 years ago that the size of the cell\'s nucleus is proportional to the size of the cell. In the intervening years, similar observations have been made about other, large structures that self-assemble in the cell. This raises a fascinating question:,..... FOR FULL ABSTRACT AND EVENT LISTING CLICK HERE
Complex Systems Special Public Event: Carl Bergstrom presents “The crisis of human collective decision-making in a social media world” <--- CLICK TO WATCH TALK
Carl Bergstrom, Department of Biology, University of Washington
Presented: January 31, 2023 in Rackham Amphitheatre
ABSTRACT: We are a species of information foragers. Individually and collectively, we have evolved to scour our natural and social environments for useful information. Over the past twenty years, society has constructed an information pipeline, the so-called Internet 2.0, to satisfy and profit from our evolved desires for novel information and social connection. What happens when the scale of human communication is radically transformed in the span of a generation, and our mechanisms for creating collective understanding are upended? What happens when this entire process is not stewarded to promote the spread of accurate information, strengthen democracy, and advance human well-being—but rather is to a first approximation engineered by machine learning algorithms to get people to click on advertisements? ... CLICK HERE FOR ABSTRACT AND FULL EVENT LISTING
Earlier Recordings