After each presentation of Best Festival Ever, the audience join us for a glass of wine and a conversation with an expert who helps explain how some of the systems science and resilience concepts from the show are used in real-life contexts.We are excited to announce the guest scientists for our Seymour Centre season from Wed 31 May - Sat 3 June. Tickets available here.
Wednesday 31 May - Dr Michael HarréAmong the seemingly disparate issues that concern many of us are how our retirement years will be affected by the prevailing financial markets and other economic conditions, and the implications of climate change for the long-term prospects of human life on this planet. Dr Michael Harré's research into complex adaptive systems has applications in both of these areas, among many others. He studies how systems as diverse as financial markets and environmental ecosystems evolve and are affected by variations in human behaviour, with the aim of allowing us to better manage these systems and to thrive as a society in the complex environments in which we live."We are not well equipped, cognitively speaking, to deal with the complexity of the systems that have come to dominate our world: financial and economic systems, climatic systems and even our social interactions and how information is spread. Everything depends on everything else, often leading to the impression that chaos and disorder dominate, and that trying to understand such systems is a lost cause. But if we scratch the surface, there are often some basic underlying principles. Understanding these is the biggest challenge we face today, and this is what my work aims to do.”
Thursday 1 June - Dr Joseph LizierDr. Joseph Lizier is an ARC DECRA fellow, and Senior Lecturer in Complex Systems in the Faculty of Engineering and IT. Dr. Lizier studies how biological and bio-inspired systems process information."We examine complex systems - systems made up of a large number of small entities, whose local interactions produce emergent behaviour at the system level. Classic examples are the emergence of consciousness from billions of interactions between neurons, or shock-wave traffic jams emerging from the interaction of many cars."
Friday 2 June - Dr Mahendra PiraveenanFrom human relationships to the body's neural networks to the internet, almost everything in the world can be conceptualised as a network, says Dr Mahendra Piraveenan. He studies how complex networks operate, and how this knowledge can be applied to such diverse challenges as arresting contagious disease outbreaks and designing better software."There are many structural and functional commonalities between various types of networks - from the social to the biological to the technical - and we can use our understanding of these to design better networks in each domain.”
Saturday 3 June (matinee) - Dr Ramil NigmatullinDr Ramil Nigmatullin uses computational and analytic techniques to study complex systems near criticality and far from equilibrium. He seeks connections between seemingly disparate complex phenomena using the notion of statistical mechanical universality. He is also interested in quantum technologies, in particular, in the questions of robustness and scalability of quantum computers.Saturday 3 June (evening) - Dr Joseph LizierDr. Joseph Lizier is an ARC DECRA fellow, and Senior Lecturer in Complex Systems in the Faculty of Engineering and IT. Dr. Lizier studies how biological and bio-inspired systems process information.
