Month: January 2025

ICTP – SAIFR » São Paulo School of Advanced Science on Disordered Systems

Disorder plays a central role in the theoretical description of a rich variety of systems spanning several disciplines — soft and hard condensed matter, biology, information science and engineering. Today, there is a surplus of enthusiastic and capable students with a diverse background who are eager to receive systematic training on powerful theoretical methods and exciting recent developments in the field. One of the goals of our school is to reach a broad audience that includes students interested in complexity or bio-inspired applications, as well as information science and quantum materials. Our school will establish a common forum where theories of general interest can be learned and discussed, catalyze the nucleation of new research lines in São Paulo and Brazil, and expose students to a full breadth of intellectual opportunity in the field of disordered systems.

As a São Paulo School of Advanced Science, funds are available for travel and local expenses of Master’s and PhD students from not only South America but also from other continents.

Read the full article at: www.ictp-saifr.org

International Conference on  ANTICIPATORY SYSTEMS AND ROSENNEAN COMPLEXITY. May 22 – 23, 2025, UNAM, Mexico

The National Autonomous University of Mexico, via its Research Group on Philosophy of Computing, is proud to invite you to participate in the International Conference on Anticipatory Systems and Rosennean Complexity.

Inaugurated by Dr. Robert Rosen, Anticipatory Systems Theory deals with how systems with the ability to anticipate model and act on future states. This conference aims to address anticipation in its many forms, including its philosophical, biological, cognitive, and technological dimensions. This year (2025) will also mark the 40th anniversary of the original publication of Rosen’s “Anticipatory Systems: Philosophical, Mathematical, and Methodological Foundations”, an occasion that we shall celebrate in our conference.

This conference is focused on Robert Rosen’s ideary and notions of life, complexity, modeling, and mind.

More at: anticipation.philcomp.org

Network Science in Medicine: A White Paper

Francesco Bullo; Pietro Hiram Guzzi

Recent years have seen a remarkable rise in the number of applications of network science in
the fields of biology and medicine. Networks in biology and medicine aim to represent the
organisation of living systems as a set of interacting elements at different scales, from the
subcellular to the population level. The initial application of network science in medicine
primarily focused on understanding the structure of protein interaction networks and using
these relationships to hypothesize new disease genes or novel therapeutic targets. At the same
time, network science has been widely applied in the context of molecular biology, for example
to model biological processes as gene regulatory networks. Now, with the continual influx
of biomedical big data, which is providing increasingly detailed information about various
aspects of molecular biology and medicine, the scale and scope of the network models used in
biology and medicine have skyrocketed. For example, improvements in medical imaging has
greatly facilitated the study of brain interaction networks.
Moving forward, it is imperative to develop approaches that holistically model the
complexity inherent in biological systems. Network science, in particular, has the potential to
answer critical questions in medicine that cannot be addressed through standard approaches.
By capitalizing on tools designed to quantify the fundamental properties of large-scale complex
systems, network science offers a complementary view to that of systems biology, which
tends to focus on basic mechanisms and small to medium-scale biological models. We believe
there has never been a better opportunity to employ network science to make sense of large,
complex biological systems and tackle some of medicine’s most challenging open questions. In this white paper, we review several key areas where network science has the best opportunity to contribute to medical applications and posit several critical future directions for the field.

Read the full article at: netscisociety.net

Robert Rosen

Robert Rosen was a leading theoretical biologist in the tradition of relational biology, making important contributions to the understanding of living systems.

We believe that Robert Rosen’s work represents valuable perspectives on biology, causality, and science as a whole, and that it deserves to be more widely known and read. Over the last four years, we have taken care in classifying his complete published works, including articles, chapters, commentaries, and books both in and out of print, and most importantly, scanning and sorting a small part of his vast collection of unedited notes, which contain ideas that extend beyond his published works.

Our hope is that interested readers will find a foundation here for a new science of biological systems, one that reflects the nature and complexity of these systems.

Visit: www.rosenlife.org