Carlos Gershenson - Balance: A Narrative for Complexity

We've been fortunate to have a group of amazing speakers at The Complexity Lounge. And this month, our good luck continues as we welcome Carlos Gershenson why the concept of balance is critical in the study of complexity.

One of the main goals of science is to find regularities in nature, to describe a variety of phenomena using the same framework. One of these regularities is balance, which has been found in a broad diversity of examples and used in several philosophies since antiquity.

Concepts such as complexity, evolution, criticality, antifragility, and the slower-is-faster effect can be seen as resulting from different types of balance. Different mechanisms and properties that can promote or seek balance, such as adaptation, self-organization, and heterogeneity, will be reviewed, along with case studies of applications.

Finally, the philosophical implications of a worldview grounded in the scientific study of balance will be explored.

Bio
Carlos Gershenson is a SUNY Empire Innovation Professor at the Department of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering, Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science, State University of New York at Binghamton. He was a research professor (2008-2023) at the Center for Complexity Sciences and Instituto de Investigaciones en Matemáticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He was a Visiting Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute (2022-2023), Visiting Professor at MIT and at Northeastern University (2015-2016) and at ITMO University (2015-2019). He was a postdoctoral fellow at the New England Complex Systems Institute (2007-2008). He holds a PhD summa cum laude from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium (2002-2007). His thesis was on “Design and Control of Self-organizing Systems”. He holds an MSc degree in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems, from the University of Sussex (2001-2002), and a BEng degree in Computer Engineering from the Fundación Arturo Rosenblueth, México. (1996-2001). He studied five semesters of Philosophy at UNAM (1998-2001).

He has been an active researcher since 1997, working at the Chemistry Institute, UNAM, México, and a summer (1999) at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. He has more than 200 scientific publications in books, journals, and conference proceedings, which have been cited more than 8000 times. He has supervised 14 postdocs, 4 PhD, 19 MSc, and 7 BSc students. He has given more than 300 presentations at conferences and research group seminars. He has a wide variety of academic interests, including artificial intelligence, complex systems, self-organization, artificial life, and philosophy of science, with applications to healthcare, transportation, governance, education, cybersecurity, and more.

He is President of the Complex Systems Society, Editor-in-Chief of Complexity Digest, and a member of the Board of Advisors for Scientific American. He has received numerous awards, including a Google Research Award in Latin America and the Audi Urban Future Award. He is a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and the Mexican Academy of Informatics. He has worked in consulting, software and web development, teaching at undergraduate and graduate levels, science communication, and journalism.

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This event will be recorded. The event link will be published on meetup.com 1 hour prior.

Please note the time slot- this is an afternoon event for those of you on EST (12:00 noon to 2:00 pm).