Events
Past Event
Wednesdays@NICO Seminar: Re-Engineering Cities: The Role of Complexity Science
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level Chambers Hall
Details
Wednesdays@NICO | 12:00-1:00 PM, January 27, 2016 | Chambers Hall, Lower Level
Sybil Derrible, Assistant Professor, Civil and Materials Engineering & Director, Complex and Sustainable Urban Networks (CSUN) Lab, University of Illinois-Chicago
Abstract
By 2100, the global population is forecasted to reach 10 billion, with the vast majority of people living in cities. At the same time, cities will drastically need to adapt to provide for their residents in a sustainable manner. In the words of Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them–, and we therefore need to come up with novel solutions to effectively address our problems, away from the current practice. In this talk, I will not provide these solutions, but I will discuss recent research produced at the Complex and Sustainable Urban Networks (CSUN) Laboratory that can provide us with valuable and insightful information about our current performance. First, I will talk about our work on urban road systems; we notably found that they seem to possess a coupled complexity feature consisting of one fractal component and one non-fractal component. Second, I will discuss a new tool that we are developing using network science to perform binless frequency analyses. We have applied the tool to World Bank data (life expectancy, GDP, and GHG emissions) to track the performance of individual countries over time and to make a composite triple bottom line index. Finally, I will discuss several research ideas in the works, including ideas on spatial reasoning, inspired by Christopher Alexander's seminal article “The City is not a Tree–.
Bio
Sybil Derrible is an Assistant Professor of Sustainable Infrastructure Systems at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Director of the Complex and Sustainable Urban Networks (CSUN) Laboratory. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, and he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. Sybil was recently awarded a NSF CAREER Award for his project “Understanding the Fundamental Principles Driving Household Energy and Resource Consumption for Smart, Sustainable, and Resilient Communities–. His main research focuses on using complexity science, urban metabolism, and geographic information systems to create knowledge and generate methods to help design more sustainable and resilient urban engineering systems.
Time
Wednesday, January 27, 2016 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Lightning Talks w/ Northwestern Scholars!
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speakers:
Yessica Herrera, Visiting Scholar, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems
Talk Title: The Body Speaks: Visual Patterns of Psychological Stress
Aakriti Kumar, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems
Talk Title: Evaluating Elements of Empathic Communication with Experts, Crowds, and Large Language Models
Tingyu "Mark" Zhao, PhD Student, Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences
Talk Title: Noise Filtering in Complex Networks
Sign Up:
Sign up to present at a future Lightning Talk session. NICO Lightning Talks are open to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scholars.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/95387714084
Passcode: NICO25
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, data science and network science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, May 14, 2025 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Rosemary Braun, Northwestern University "The Scale of Life"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Rosemary Braun, Associate Professor, Department of Molecular Biosciences, Northwestern University
Title:
The Scale of Life
Abstract:
Living systems exhibit surprising and beautiful self-organization at all scales. At the atomic level, proteins self-assemble into macromolecular complexes. The function of these machines is orchestrated within the cell by regulatory networks, whose activity is in turn dictated by, and coordinated with, the cells environment. This coordination takes place across large spans of space and time: the size and lifetime of organisms as large as the blue whale. Populations and ecosystems of many organisms in turn exhibit remarkable emergent dynamics. Today, advances in single-cell assays enable us to probe the molecular state of every cell in a sample in high-dimensional detail. But is this the correct scale at which to probe living systems? What can we learn from this data, and how can we abstract from the microscopic details to macroscopic phenotypes? In this talk, I will discuss some of our recent work bridging the cell and tissue/organism scales, and discuss some challenges and opportunities for the future.
Speaker Bio:
Rosemary Braun is an Associate Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Applied Mathematics [ESAM], and Physics at Northwestern University. A theoretical physicist by training, she earned her PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois, followed by a Masters in Biostatistics from Johns Hopkins University. She completed her postdoctoral training at the National Cancer Institute (NIH) before joining Northwestern as a faculty member. Today, she works at the intersection of statistics, mathematics, and biology to develop computational tools for analyzing high-dimensional data. In addition to her Northwestern affiliations, she is also Associate Director of the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology, as well as external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/97015976754
Passcode: NICO25
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, data science and network science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, May 21, 2025 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)