Los Alamos National Laboratory

Center for Nonlinear Studies

Workshop on

Collectives formation and specialization in biological
and social systems

April 20-22, 2005, Hotel Radisson, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

PROGRAM TRAVEL INFO REGISTRATION LODGING CNLS

Biological systems are collections of diverse components including genes, enzimes, specialized cells, organs etc., each performing some special function in the collective. Similar organization and specialization is present in social groups like insect colonies and human society. Thus a number of fundamental questions arise:

  • How does hierarhical organisation spontaneously emerge in natural living systems?
  • Are there any general principles valid for different systems and at different levels of the hierarchy?
  • What are the minimal ingredients of an artificial system that naturally evolves towards higher complexity?
  • How does competition lead to the formation of cooperating collectives and the emergence of specialization?
This workshop is going to review examples of specialization and collective behavior in biological and social systems and work towards developing theoretical approaches to the questions raised above.

Key topics to be discussed are:

  • bio-macromolecules, genetic networks, morphogenesis
  • evolutionary dynamics, game theory, ecology
  • networks of neurons, brain function, learning
  • robots, design of artificial collectives
  • self-organization in human institutions

Confirmed invited speakers

Herbert Gintis (Massachusetts)
Dirk Helbing (TU, Dresden)
Laurent Keller (Lausanne)
Robert L. Axtell (Brookings)
Peter Schuster (Vienna)
Dario Floreano (EPFL,Lausanne)
Simon Levin (Princeton)
Dante Chialvo (Northwestern)
Sidney Redner (Boston/LANL)
Thomas Vincent (Arizona)
Christoph Hauert (Harvard)
Yi Jiang (LANL)
Bernhard Palsson (UCSD)
Christian Forst (LANL)
Kevin E. Bassler (Houston)

Organizers

Akira Namatame (NDA, Japan)
Zoltan Neufeld (UCD, Dublin)
Peter Stadler (Leipzig)
Zoltan Toroczkai (LANL)
David Wolpert (NASA)

Contact: collectives@cnls.lanl.gov
We plan to have a limited number of contributed talks. Interested participants should send a title and abstract to collectives@cnls.lanl.gov.