Potential Topics:
(Note: this list is undoubtedly
incomplete, in no particular order, and subject to change;
more detailed treatments of many of the topics that follow
will appear in the advanced courses.)
- Definitions and background
-
- Complex (adaptapive) systems
- Weak and strong emergence
- Measures of complexity
- Scaling phenomena
-
- Zipf's law
- Non-Gaussian statistics and power-law size
distributions
- Sample mechanisms leading to power-law size
distributions
- Allometry
- Organisms and organizations
- Scaling of social phenomena: crime, creativity,
and consumption.
- Growth mechanisms (part of above story)
-
- Size distributions
- Agglomeration processes
- Accretion processes
- Multiscale complex systems
-
- Hierarchies and scaling
- Modularity
- Form and context in design
- Complexity in abstract models
-
- The game of life
- Cellular automata
- Chaos and order---creation and maintenance
- Integrity of complex systems
- Generic failure mechanisms
- Network robustness
- Highly optimized tolerance: Robustness and
fragility
- Normal accidents and high reliability theory
- Complex networks
-
- Small-world networks
- Scale-free networks
- Collective behavior and contagion in social
systems
-
- Percolation and phase transitions
- Disease spreading models
- Schelling's model of segregation
- Granovetter's model of imitation
- Contagion on networks
- Herding phenomena
- Cooperation
- Success inequality: superstardom
- Collective decision making
-
- Theories of social choice
- The role of randomness and chance
- Systems of voting
- Juries
- Distribution and redistribution networks
-
- Single source supply networks
- Distributed source supply networks
- Information
-
- Search in networked systems (e.g., the WWW,
social systems)
- Search on scale-free networks
- Knowledge trees, metadata and tagging
- Network analysis and visualization
-
- Jung
- Pajek
- Graphviz
- SoNIA