BIMSA Workshop on the physics of complex systems

Many physical, biological, engineering, and societal processes can be explained as complex systems, characterized by a large number of interacting degrees of freedom. The theoretical and computational tools for dissecting complex systems are founded on the physical principles, cross-pollinated by mathematics, statistics, ecology, evolutionary game theory, and graph theory. This mini-workshop aims to expose the faculty, post-doctors, and students to a selection of topics at the forefront of complex systems research.

Lectures

10:00am – 11:00am

Speaker: Rongling Wu

Title: A new norm of statistical physics: Disentangling aging

11:00am – 12:00am

Speaker: Carlo Vittorio Cannistraci

Title: Complex network geometry and intelligence

13:00pm – 14:00pm

Speaker: Jie Wu

Title: Algebraic topology and GLMY homology

14:00pm – 15:00pm

Discussion: How can we benefit from high-order interactions of mathematics-physics-biology?

Speakers'Bio

Dr. R. Wu is Research Fellow at Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications and Zeng Siming Chair Professor at Tsinghua University Yau Mathematical Sciences Center. He is Fellow of American Statistical Association (ASA) and Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Dr. Wu’s research interest centers on statistical modeling of complex systems, especially via interdisciplinary cross-pollination. He develops FunGraph to trace how each cell telegraphs to every other cell across tissues in an organism. His work on statistical research has been recorded in 450 peer-reviewed scholarly journals and four monographs published by Springer, CRC/Chapman Hall, and Elsevier.

Dr. Cannistraci is a theoretical engineer and computational innovator. He is a Professor in the Tsinghua Laboratory of Brain and Intelligence (THBI) and an adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science and in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tsinghua University. He directs the Center for Complex Network Intelligence (CCNI) in THBI, which seeks to create pioneering algorithms at the interface between information science, physics of complex systems, complex networks and machine intelligence, with a particular focus in brain/life-inspired computing for big data analysis. These computational methods are often applied to precision biomedicine, neuroscience, social and economic science. His website: https://brain.tsinghua.edu.cn/en/info/1010/1003.htm.

Professor Jie Wu received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Rochester in 1995. He was a former tenured professor of National University of Singapore. In December 2021, he joined BIMSA. His research interests are algebraic topology and applied topology. His main achievements in mathematics are to establish the fundamental relations between homotopy groups and the theory of braids, and the fundamental relations between loop spaces and modular representation theory of symmetric groups. In terms of applied topology, he has obtained various important results on topological approaches to data science.He has published over 100 academic papers in high quality journals. In 2007, he won the National Science Award of Singapore.