The Complex Systems Society (CSS) organizes every year a main conference (CCS) – the most important annual meeting for the complex systems research community.

The Complex Systems Society invites bids to host the edition for 2024 and 2025.

The conference is generally held in September/October of each year.

More at: cssociety.org

This is a reading diary of a naïve complexity / computational social scientist’s first encounter with F. A. Hayek + Eastern Bloc tektology & cybernetics.

You might have heard about project Cybersyn? In 1970s Chile, Salvador Allende’s socialist regime was betting on a systems-theoretical approach to the complex decision-making that’s an inevitable consequence of a planned economy. Captain Kirk would feel at home as operators were rocking the latest cybernetic algorithms. That all ended with the US-backed military coup that installed Augusto Pinochet as a dictator. But did the influence of complex-systems ideas end? Oh no! Pinochet called in economist F. A. Hayek—a vanguard of complexity economics and a firm believer in emergence and self-organization for the social good—to shape a Chilean free-market economy.

In its broadest sense, is complexity science spacious enough to support any ideology? Curious about that, I went on a weeklong tour to the…

In today’s post, I am looking at the dichotomy of control in stoicism through the lens of cybernetics. My main source for the dichotomy of control (DoC) is the great Stoic philosopher, Epictetus. One of the common interpretations of this dichotomy is that we need to realize what is in our control and what is not in our control. We should accept the things that are not in our control as they are. The only thing we can control is how we react to them. As a fan of cybernetics, I was attracted to the notion of “control”. I will discuss this idea of DoC first from a first order cybernetics standpoint, and then from a second order cybernetics standpoint. First order cybernetics is the study of observed systems, and second order cybernetics is the study of observing systems.

There are many translations out there for Epictetus’ Enchiridion. My main…

Jarrod Shilts, Yannik Severin, Francis Galaway, Nicole Müller-Sienerth, Zheng-Shan Chong, Sophie Pritchard, Sarah Teichmann, Roser Vento-Tormo, Berend Snijder & Gavin J. Wright
Nature volume608,pages397–404 (2022)

The human immune system is composed of a distributed network of cells circulating throughout the body, which must dynamically form physical associations and communicate using interactions between their cell-surface proteomes1. Despite their therapeutic potential2, our map of these surface interactions remains incomplete3,4. Here, using a high-throughput surface receptor screening method, we systematically mapped the direct protein interactions across a recombinant library that encompasses most of the surface proteins that are detectable on human leukocytes. We independently validated and determined the biophysical parameters of each novel interaction, resulting in a high-confidence and quantitative view of the receptor wiring that connects human immune cells. By integrating our interactome with expression data, we identified trends in the dynamics of immune interactions and constructed a reductionist mathematical model that…