education > undergraduate > CSCS 281/Poli Sci 281

CSCS 281/Poli Sci 281

Many of the biggest challenges facing the modern world: global warming and sustainability, epidemics, terrorism, and the impacts of technology and globalization can be formally characterized as complex. They're the product of diverse agents and/or entities that interact in spatial temporal frameworks in which positive and negative feedbacks produce emergent structures (such as epidemics and hurricanes) and path dependent outcomes. Confronting these challenges requires an understanding of the properties of complex systems.

In this course, students learn the fundamental properties of complex adaptive systems and apply that knowledge to meeting the aforementioned challenges. The course consists of three parts. In the first part, we provide an overview of complex systems theory and concepts. This material requires familiarity and comfort with some basic mathematics, but nothing beyond basic probability and algebra. In the second part, we introduce and analyze models. For example, students will learn (i) the SIR model of infectious disease to help them understand relationships between the numbers of susceptible (S), infected (I), and recovered (R) in the population (ii) network based models of inequality and information spread (iii) models of self organized criticality and (iv) systems dynamics models of negative and positive feedbacks. Our goal is to present these models three ways: with mathematics, computation, and experimentation. In the experimental setting, students will have to interact within a complex system and attempt to harness its potential. In the third part of the course, subject matter experts present cutting edge research on the aforementioned global challenges, which will be interpreted through the theoretical lenses developed earlier. For example, students will learn about the complex relationship between ecosystem diversity and robustness and relate their theoretical insights to empirical evidence from real ecosystems.

Students will be expected to work with these models and to think critically about how to apply them in the real world. They'll be encouraged to think about potential solutions to these challenges as well as the social, political, and economic implications of their proposed policies. That thinking will be informed by, in fact guided by, the formal models they've acquired during the semester.

4 credits, 3 hours of lecture, 1 hour of seminar

Primary faculty member: Scott Page

Fall 2008 Schedule:
Lecture: MW 10:00-11:30
Seminar: choose 1: M-Th 5:00-6:00, F 10:00-11:00 or 11:00-12:00
Place: TBA

Updated April 1, 2008