GDR Rift seminar
The East African Rift is considered by the members of our GDR as a socio-eco-geo-bio-system, where its numerous elements (or actors) interact at different time and spacial scales, under the influence of internal and external factors. To understand this system and its evolution also means to understand the complexity of the relationships between the elements of the rift. With this in mind, Pierre Collet will give us a presentation on Complex Systems, and will discuss with us how this new discipline can help us to tackle our problematics.
March 29 2022 – 10h
Salle du Conseil ITES (Strasbourg) or videoconference.
Pierre COLLET
Complex Systems, a new science that appeared in the middle of the 20th century
The atomic revolution at the beginning of the 20th century was accompanied by the quantum revolution, showing that, a priori, nothing is continuous in our world, not even time or space (cf. Planck’s wall, the latest theories of loop quantum gravitation)… The implication of these discoveries is massive and affects all sciences, with unexpected consequences, the main one being that the hard sciences are actually all soft sciences, except for non-applied mathematics…
This seminar will review the foundations of Complex Systems and will explain (in the etymological sense of the term) how they work and why it is now necessary to think about how all sciences (and in particular the hard sciences) should be revisited in the light of Complex Systems.
Pierre Collet, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Strasbourg since 2007, co-founded in 2012 with Paul Bourgine and Cyrille Bertelle the Complex Systems Digital Campus, which became UNESCO’s UniTwin in 2014. This UniTwin, which brings together more than 130 universities in 38 countries, aims to develop and disseminate the new science of complex systems. He co-leads a research team on complex systems and translational bioinformatics at the ICUBE laboratory. His research areas are complex systems, stochastic optimisation, nature-inspired computation and explainable, autonomous and ethical artificial intelligence, all applied to a large number of different domains (complex systems are transversal).
