Guest Lecturers
Stuart Kauffman and Justin Werfel
NECSI is pleased to welcome two guest lecturers to the upcoming Summer School, Stuart Kauffman and Justin Werfel.
Stuart Kauffman is a theoretical biologist and complex systems scientist who studies the origin of life. He is best known for arguing that the complexity of organisms results as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from natural selection. Kauffman has held appointments as Distinguished Finnish Professor, Tampere University of Technology, Finland and Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Vermont. He was the Founder and Director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary. He received a MacArthur Prize and the Herbert Simon Award at the International Conference on Complex Systems. He is the author of widely read books including Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution (Oxford University Press), and Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion (Basic Books). He graduated from Dartmouth, was awarded the BA (Hons) by Oxford University, and completed a medical degree (M.D.) at the University of California, San Francisco. He will speak in the first week, during CX201.
Justin Werfel is a research scientist at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, where he studies complex and emergent systems with a focus on swarm robotics. He will give a special lecture on his recently published paper in Science (343: 754–758 (2014)) entitled “Designing Collective Behavior in a Termite-Inspired Robot Construction Team.” He has also been featured in Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and International Journal of Robotics Research, among others. He won the Best Student Paper Award at the 2010 ANTS International Conference on Swarm Intelligence, and has delivered keynote speeches, conducted workshops, and presented at conferences worldwide. Werfel has held research positions at NECSI, Harvard Medical School/Children’s Hospital Boston, and Harvard’s Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, and was a research affiliate at the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 2006-2012. He received an A.B. in Physics from Princeton University, an S.M. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and a PhD in Computer Science from MIT. He will also speak in the first week, during CX201.
Courses
The schedule of the summer school is as follows:
Week 1: June 16-20 CX201: Complex Physical, Biological and Social Systems
Lab: June 22 CX102: Computer Programming and Complex Systems
Week 2: June 23-27 CX202: Complex Systems Modeling and Networks
Registration: http://necsi.edu/education/sch
