Robert Savit

Professor Savit’s current research interests are in the area of nonlinear and adaptive systems. His group examines two types of issues. First, they study the nature of adaptive competition for scarce resources. They examine the deep phase structure that such systems exhibit, and explore the application of their insights to problems in group decision making in business, in social systems, resource allocation problems, and evolutionary systems. Professor Savit also engages in a series of experiments with groups of human subjects that study the problem of resource allocation, competition and emergent coordination.

Second, his research group considers data analysis problems of nonlinear systems. Using new techniques developed in the context of dynamical systems, Professor Savit’s group studies a number of intrinsically nonlinear systems. Among these are both mechanical and biological systems. In particular, he is working on the problem of understanding and predicting epileptic seizures.

Selected Publications

Nonlinear, Non-Invasive Method for Seizure Anticipation in Focal Epilepsy, (with D. Li, W. Zhou and I. Drury), to appear in Mathematical Biosciences (2003).

Man and Superman: Human Limitations, Innovation and Emergence in Resource Competition, (with K. Koelle, W. Treynor and R. Gonzalez), to appear in the proceedings of the NASA Conference on Cooperative Intelligence, NASA Ames Research Center (2002).

Understanding Dynamical State Changes in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, (with D. Li, W. Zhou and I. Drury), invited review paper for a special issue of Journal of Clinical Neurophysiology 18, 246-258 (2001).

Evolution in Minority Games II: Games with a Variable Strategy Spaces, (with Y. Li and R. Riolo), Physica A 276, 265 (2000).

Adaptive Competition, Market Efficiency and Phase Transitions, (with R. Manuca and R. Riolo), Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 2203 (1999).

Field(s) of Study

• Theoretical Physics and Complex Systems