European Conference on Complex Systems 2006 (ECCS '06)

Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

25-29 September 2006

Proceedings (PDF)

Online proceedings with comments and slides

Video of plenary sessions

Browse the Interactive Programme of Satellite Worskops

 Programme of the conference

 Poster Sessions

Speakers from all over the world, who are widely recognised as leaders in their respective fields of research, gave a series of challenging talks which are now available as archive streams. http://sbs-xnet.sbs.ox.ac.uk/complexity/complexity_ECCS06.asp

TOWARDS A SCIENCE OF COMPLEX SYSTEMS

Complex systems, as networks of interacting entities, are studied empirically through the rapidly increasing mass of data which has become available in many different domains. At the same time, these different domains also appear to share many new and fundamental theoretical questions. These circumstances should encourage the interdisciplinary development of a new science of complex systems.

It is possible to identify two kinds of interdisciplinarity within complex systems research. The first begins with a particular complex system and addresses a variety of questions coming from that particular domain and disciplinary point of view. This may lead to the emergence of new domain-specific interdisciplinary fields such as cognitive science. The second kind of interdisciplinarity starts from questions that are fundamental to complex systems in general. The new science of complex systems is primarily characterised by this second kind of interdisciplinarity, which starts from fundamental open questions relevant to many domains, and searches for general methods to deal with them.

These two kinds of interdisciplinarity are complementary and interdependent: any advance in one can lead to progress in the other. The new science of complex systems will need to develop through a continually renewed process of reconstructing data from models, and will require engagement with both kinds of interdisciplinarity. In particular, modelling and understanding the dynamics of complex systems remains one of the major challenges for modern science. Our increasing ability to address this challenge is based on a combination of the growing mass of empirical data which has recently become accessible, and the large increase in computational power which can support and underpin significant advances in our theoretical understanding of complex systems.

Monday, 25 September 2006
Morning: Conference Registration and Plenary Talks
Afternoon: Multi-track parallel sessions

Tuesday, 26 September 2006
Morning: Plenary Talks
Afternoon: Multi-track parallel sessions

Wednesday, 27 September 2006
Morning: Plenary Talks
Afternoon: Multi-track parallel sessions
Evening: Conference banquet

Thursday, 28 September 2006
All day: Satellite Workshops

Friday, 29 September 2006
All day: Satellite Workshops

ECCS ’06 is the second in an annual series of conferences organised by the new European Complex Systems Society. The European Commission is providing financial support for the conference through the ONCE-CS and GIACS Coordination Actions, which are funded under the Sixth Framework by the Future and Emerging Technologies Unit of the Information Society Technology (IST) Programme and the New and Emerging Technology (NEST) initiative respectively. Additional financial support for student bursaries and satellite workshops has been made available by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The current conference follows ECCS ’05, the first conference organised by the European Complex Systems Society, which was held in Paris on 14-18 November 2005. An earlier European Conference on Complex Systems was held in Turin on 5-7 December 2004.