by Sergi Valverde

Abstract: When looking at the history of technology, we can see that all inventions are not of equal importance. Only of a few technologies have the potential to start a new branching series (specifically, by increasing diversity), have a lasting impact in human life and ultimately became turning points. Technological transitions correspond to times and places in the past when a large number of novel artefact forms or behaviours appeared together or in rapid succession. Why does that happen? Is technological innovation continuous and gradual or it occurs in sudden leaps and bounds? The evolution of information technology allows for a quantitative and theoretical approach to technological transitions. The value of information systems experiences sudden changes when when we learn how to use this technology, when we can accumulate large amounts of information and when communities of practice create and exchange information freely. The coexistence between gradual improvements and discontinuous technological change is a consequence of the asymmetric relationship between complexity and hardware and software. Using a cultural evolution approach, I suggest that sudden changes in the organization of information technologies depend on the high costs of maintaining and transmitting reliable information.

Currently Dr. Riccardo Di Clemente is a Postdoctoral Associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MiT, at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Collaborator of Comune di Roma  to apply the Complex System Analysis to optimize the school size distribution in Rome city-center sponsored by Roma 1 Municipio.
Riccardo obtained his M.Sc and B.Sc. in Theoretical Statistical Physics at Sapienza University of Rome.
He received his Ph.D. in Economics (at Institute for Advanced Studies IMTLucca, Italy) where he discussed a thesis that applies complexity tools to Economics and Social system in order to extract strategy for policy making.
His recent two works on schooling system and drug abuse received great deal of action by the Italian press as example of new methods for policy making applied to social science:

• The Italian all-news channel Sky TG24 had interviewed lived as expert on the Italian school system organization. Here the link to the 10min interview.

• The italian newspaper La Stampa on the third page had published an article on the relevance of his research for developing a better school system. The extract of the newspaper (in Italian).

• The italian world news agency ANSA and some italian journals (e.g. Corriere della Sera, La Stampa) had published a news on the relevance of my paper “Statistical Agent Based Modelization of the Phenomenon of Drug Abuse, DOI :10.1038/srep00532” for studying drugs Abuse phenomena. Read here the ANSA (in italian).

He recently was Visiting Scholar funded by EU-program “talent at work” at INET@OXFORD where it examined in depth the Uk Economic complexity in collaboration with the IPPR.  See the project: Backing Clusters To Boost Britain’s Exports
He specialises in the application of tools from physics and mathematics in the fields of economics, finance and the social sciences.

by Vittorio Loreto

Abstract: Innovations are key factors in the evolution of human societies, since they represent the primary motor to explore new  solutions in ever-changing and unpredictable environments. New technological
artefacts, scientific discoveries, new social and cultural structures, are very often triggered by mutated
external conditions. Unfortunately, the detailed mechanisms through which humans and societies express their creativity and innovate are largely unknown and no comprehensive mathematical framework has been proposed so far. Creative solutions, novelties and innovation share an important feature: often,  innovative events do not happen by chance, rather they seem to be triggered by some previous novelty or innovation. In studies of biological, technological, and cultural evolution, it has been hypothesized that one innovation can lay the groundwork for another by creating fresh opportunities. In our daily lives, a similar process may account for why one new thing so often leads to another. This idea has been beautifully summarized by the notion  of adjacent possible introduced by Stuart Kauffman. In this picture the advance into the adjacent possible is the driving force for correlating innovative events, and novelties are     produced through an exploration of a space – physical, conceptual, technological or biological – that enlarges itself whenever one reaches a point of the space never touched before.

Vittorio Loreto is Professor of Physics of Complex Systems at Sapienza University and Research Leader at the ISI Foundation. He is now spending a sabbatical year at SONY Computer Science Lab in Paris. Loreto is coordinating the co-laboratory of Social Dynamics spread among Sapienza University of Rome and the ISI Foundation. His scientific activity is mainly focused on the statistical physics of complex systems and its interdisciplinary applications. In the last few years he has been active in the fields of granular media, complexity and information theory, complex networks theory, communication and language evolution. He coordinated several project at the EU level and he is recently coordinated the EU project EveryAware, devoted to enhancing environmental awareness in urban contexts using social information technologies. In this framework he has been developing new tools for web-gaming, social computation and learning. He published over 120 papers in internationally refereed journals and chaired several workshops and conferences. He was the vice-chairman of STATPHYS 23, the 23rd International Conference on Statistical Physics. Loreto is the coordinator of the KREYON project.

Bernardo Monechi got his PhD Studenhip at the “Sapienza” University of Rome. His Master Thesis dealt with problems related with the dynamics of long range interacting systems. He has been invovled in the Complex World PhD programme, aiming at analysing and modelling the European Air Traffic within the framework of Complex Systems. His PhD activity also concers the topic of human mobility in urban environments. He is currently working at ISI Foundation.

by Ilan Chabay

Abstract: Education must be improved substantially in order to help all people learn to think both creatively and critically over the full span of education from early childhood to university to life-long learning. I will discuss approaches to developing a coherent learning experience that helps people become better and more engaged learners and is better attuned to helping people deal with the urgent and vital global issues in local contexts (e.g., food, water, energy, environmental degradation).

by Mirko Degli Esposti

Abstract: Like most human productions, language is the product of cultural evolution, and as such exhibits high levels of complexity. A natural representation of language is written text, the development of expressing language by letters or other marks. Developing of writing coincides with the developing of literature and both processes have been highly effected by the developing of technologies, up to the enormous proliferation (at least quantitatively) in our modern digital environment. In the talk we will address questions such as how to characterize originality in authors or texts, and how innovations originate amid universal features of language usage? Or again, how can we discriminate between artificially generated texts and human writings? We will do this while discussing two specific examples.
The first one regards the detection of computer generated papers in scientific literature, a problem of increasing practical importance.
The second one concern the Voynich Manuscript and we will present some recent results.

by Thomas Fink

Abstract: Creativity has been hailed as a key force behind the economic success of businesses and nations. While many recognise that creativity is a universal human capability, popular views reduce it to the confined domain of a talented few. Yet it remains unclear what drives creativity, or how to promote it. We propose that anonymous collaboration with constrained freedom makes possible emergent creativity: the spontaneous display of creativity amongst non-cooperating individuals, greater than any could achieve alone. We outline a theoretical framework for predicting emergent creativity, and propose platforms for demonstrating it. Emergent creativity may profoundly extend the creative boundaries of mankind.

by François Pachet

Abstract: Style is what makes an author (writer, composer, designer, etc.) recognizable. Can machines understand, model, predict and generate artefacts in a given style? In the Flow-Machines project, we address these questions for music and text. I will show several generative models of style able to capture characteristic traits of musical sequences, as well as polyphonies, both in the symbolic (score) and numeric (audio) domains. These models are based on the combination of combinatorial (so-called Markov constraints) and statistical perspectives on music. I will use various reorchestrations of “Ode to Joy”, the European anthem, to illustrate these various approaches. Along the way these increasingly sophisticated models in turn, raise more fundamental questions about nature of music and the mysterious mechanisms of taste and subjective appreciation.

by Andreas Roepstroff

Abstract: How is it that two persons may solve a task better than each of them may on their own? Using a set of simple experiments, I will examine how people when solving simple tasks in interaction couple to each other in several domains. It seems that the dynamics of these interaction are shaped not just by the task at hand, but very much by the rules of the game. This may have implications for how to design creative settings.