About this Event
Funded by a Big Ideas Accelerator award, join us for at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) for a networking session and lunch followed by guest speaker Professor David Krakauer, President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at The Santa Fe Institute. Krakauer will be joining us online to deliver a presentation entitled ‘The Complex World’. This promises to be a fascinating exploration of complexity science with unique insights from a global leader in the field.
Photo credit: Kate Joyce, 2022
"The Complex World"
The origin and evolution of life marked a threshold in the evolution of the cosmos. New forms or matter – self-organized, purposeful, adaptable, intelligent, and robust – proliferated across the surface of the earth. This complex world is defined by a history of life and culture, and by the human ideas and inventions required to make sense of them. Perhaps for the first time in scholarship, principles have assumed primacy over disciplines – information, memory, decision-making, coordination, and communication transcend their appearance in the domains of biology, sociology, history, engineering, and medicine. A focus on the principles leads to the possibility of connections and shared inquiries rather than divisions and mutual disregard. Complexity science is complementary to the careful and meticulous exploration of a single field, and the possibility of unification that it suggests is long overdue.
About
David's research explores the evolution of intelligence and stupidity on Earth. This includes studying the evolution of genetic, neural, linguistic, social, and cultural mechanisms supporting memory and information processing, and exploring their shared properties.
He served as the founding director of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, the co-director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation, and professor of mathematical genetics, all at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has been a visiting fellow at the Genomics Frontiers Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, a Sage Fellow at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a long-term fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, and visiting professor of evolution at Princeton University.
In 2012, he was included in the Wired Magazine Smart List: Fifty People Who Will Change the World. In 2016, he was included in Entrepreneur Magazine’s list of visionary leaders advancing global research and business.
He was previously chair of the faculty and a resident professor and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. A graduate of the University of London, where he went on to earn degrees in biology and computer science, Dr. Krakauer received his D.Phil. in evolutionary theory from Oxford University in 1995. He remained at Oxford as a postdoctoral research fellow, and two years later was named a Wellcome Research Fellow in mathematical biology and lecturer at Pembroke College.
https://davidckrakauer.com/
What is Edinburgh Complexity?
From December 2024 - March 2025, Edinburgh Complexity will be hosting a series of workshops with guest speakers to co-create with researchers from across the University an infrastructure to support the development of complex systems research at Edinburgh.
To join the network and sign up for future events, please join us on Edinburgh Complexity | General | Microsoft Teams
This programme has been led by Javier Escudero (School of Engineering) and Enda Delaney (Director of Research at Edinburgh Futures Institute) and delivered by EFI's Innovation Services.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Edinburgh Futures Institute, 1 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
USD 0.00
