Complexity Sciences Center, Physics, UC Davis

Davis, CA

Peter Byrne and Jim Crutchfield, Co-Organizers

Support: FQXi, ASL, and CSC

DESCRIPTION

A one day, invitational conference in the San Francisco Bay Area drawing from a range of sciences – physicists and computational scientists, information and complexity theorists, evolutionary biologists, neuroscientists, forensic psychologists, behavioral economists, and sociologists. Target participants are researchers working in the larger Bay Area who will make review presentations to focus discussions. We will discuss empirically-based methods of modeling terrorism and counterterrorism (TCT) as a self-organizing system in which feedback loops create robustly complex, unpredictable collective behaviors. The goals are to identify theoretical methods from mathematics and the physical sciences for quantifying pockets of stability and potential instabilities, to outline the foundations of a complex TCT system model based on real world data that can spot regularities and patterns, and to explore economic and social phase transitions that can be controlled through identification of system drivers. A particular emphasis will be on how society’s exuberant development, deployment, and dependence on technology leads to organizations and multiplex networks that are increasingly fragile and so susceptible to terrorism.

OUTPUTS

o Meeting

o Report

o Proposals

o Video

o Terrorism-Counterterrorism Game

o Art installation