Complexity Science Hub
Since 2016, the Complexity Science Hub has conducted independent science for a better understanding of our complex world. We advance progress by extracting meaning from the enormous amounts of data representing our planet in its various dimensions: the economy, human migration, health and disease, climate crisis, social values, urban development, conflict, and more. Our research approaches let us see the world in a new way, as interconnected, dynamic, co-evolving, extensive networks, that allow us to understand these complex systems and identify their weaknesses and strengths. Using this knowledge, we can make evidence-based statements about how complex systems will respond to change and propose realistic interventions to move them in a positive direction for society. In other words, we want to find solutions for a better world.
We employ more than 70 independent researchers who together cover knowledge in disciplines ranging from algorithms to zoonoses and everything in between. Each researcher has a breadth of expertise – most often a disciplinary specialization (e.g., sociology, economics, medicine) in addition to physics, computation, and/or applied mathematics. We are unified by the vocabulary of complexity science – a set of computational, mathematical, data analytic, and modeling tools.
Theory of Change
One of their themes is considering the potential of 'societal collapse', and the breakdown of complex systems. How exactly do complex systems endure? How do they adapt?
As they put on their website:
Climate change, financial turbulences, worldwide urbanization trends, growing numbers of natural disasters, impacts of fake news, migration: coping with the grand challenges of the 21st century needs a deeper quantitative and predictive understanding of complex systems. The science of complex systems provides us with new methods and novel ways of addressing these systems that were thought to be unintelligible only a few decades ago.
Complexity science links state-of-the-art mathematics, modelling, data and computer science with fundamental questions posed from various disciplines, such as medicine, economics, ecology or social sciences, and opens new paths to a deeper understanding of systemic risks, resilience, efficiency, and the requirements for sustainable innovation and creativity.
Key Learning Resources
By asking fundamental questions around the nature of complex systems, they seem to be an important resource for getting an understanding of how the world works. They hope not only to understand the world but leverage that understanding through transformation; they seem to believe that the key (or one of the keys) to transformation is greater understanding, and they provide a number of resources to consider this.