New England Complex Systems Institute

Yaneer Bar-Yam is Founding President of the New England Complex Systems Institute. His research is focused both on formalizing complex systems concepts and relating them to everyday problems. In particular, he studies the relationship between observations at different scales, formal properties of descriptions of systems, the relationship of structure and function, the representation of information as a physical quantity, and quantitative properties of the complexity of real systems. He has developed quantitative models for a wide variety of complex system behaviors including network dynamics, market instability and the current financial crisis, negotiation, economic development, pandemics and invasive species, ethnic violence, global food crises, and biological cell function and regulation. Applications have been to physical, biological and social systems. He also has made further contributions to the theory of the structural and electronic dynamics of materials, the theory of polymer dynamics and protein folding, the theory of neural networks and structure-function relationships, the theory of quantitative multiscale complexity, and the theory of evolution.

Bar-Yam is chairman of the International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS), managing editor of InterJournal and Springer book series on complexity, and author of a foundational textbook on complex systems, “Dynamics of Complex Systems,” (1997) and popular text, “Making Things Work” . He has advised a wide variety of government agencies, non-governmental organizations and corporations about solving problems using principles and insights from complex systems science.

Plenary Address:    Complex Systems Science: Where Does It Come From and Where is It Going To?     (Yaneer Plenary)_