Complex Systems Summer School
I work for a great company - hard, interesting problems; good people; good industry; good benefits. HomeAway offers as a foundational benefit the concept of continual personal development - we have a business to run, certainly, but HomeAway has a “help them grow or watch them go” attitude which helps with both retention AND running the business better.
I’m about to head off to the Complex Systems Summer School at the Santa Fe Institute. The CSSS offers “an intensive four week introduction to complex behavior in mathematical, physical, living, and social systems for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the sciences and social sciences.” I don’t exactly fit any of those categories, but I do have one degree in Electrical Engineering, one in Mathematics and (probably most importantly) several years of experience in the “high tech” industry.
The syllabus contains:
- Nonlinear Dynamics (I thru IV !)
- Physics
- Phase Transitions
- Statistics (I and II)
- Computation NP vs. P (I thru V)
- Networks I thru III and Complex Networks
- Limit Shapes
- Complexity I thru III
- Maximum Entropy: A Framework for Theory Construction with Application to Community Ecology
- Boltzmann Dynamics and the Integration of Macroecology and Evolutionary History
- The Rate of Aging — Theoretical and Experimental Ruminations
- Economics from a physics point of view
- Agent Based Modeling Flocking
- and Social Minds, Emergent Epidemiology, Computational Biology, Evolution I and II, Evolutionary Game Theory and, and, and…
Whew!
I don’t know what some of those words even mean, much less the concepts behind them. But that’s OK because I’m excited to learn. I can see some practical applications to my day job (“Data Scientist”) but the most exciting part is the pure “brain stretching” that the CSSS will apply.
Actually, in retrospect, meeting all these graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and industry folks like me excites me the most.
Check back here on occasion - I aim to blog the experience.