Syllabus

  • Systems

    • History.

    • Concepts.

    • Computing.

    • Philosophy.

  • Adaptation

    • Control and feedback.

    • Stationary and non-stationary spaces.

    • Chaos vs. complexity.

    • Stigmergy.

  • Examples and Applications (Self-organization)

    • Synchronization in fireflies, oscillators, and communication systems.

    • Ant foraging, ant colony optimization (ACO).

    • Swarms, particle swarm optimization (PSO).

    • Flocks, self-organizing traffic lights.

    • Self-organizing bureaucracies.

    • Public transportation systems and the equal headway instability.

    • Crowd dynamics.

  • Networks

    • Introduction to network science

    • Random Boolean networks.

    • Robustness, resilience, and antifragility.

    • Modularity, antimodularity, redundancy, degeneracy.

  • Final projects.