Yukio Gunji Kobe University

George Kampis JAIST

Ichiro Tsuda Hokkaido University

Yuzuru Sato RIKEN Brain Science, Tokyo

This is a small workshop dedicated to the study of the emerging topic of causality in complex systems. Lectures follow each other in an informal schedule. Titles to be announced on the spot.

The science of complex systems has began as the study of nonlinear dynamical systems, especially in physics and biology. Nonlinear systems have proven to be indispensible tools in the understanding and the exploitation of complexity in fields as distant as economy and artificial intelligence. In parallel, a large variety of closely related concepts have emerged, which range from self-organized criticality to scale-free graphs. At the same time, however, there is a growing recognition that complex systems are more widespread than that. Perhaps what we have seen so far are merely examples.

An encompassing study of complex systems requires new basic concepts. Among them, causality may be one of the most important. Causal interactions are responsible for the behavior of real-world complex systems such as embodied robots, developing organisms, and evolutionary systems. Causality plays a vital role in the brain, in many phenomena as fundamental as memory, percepts, and language. Causality is linked to dynamical behaviors in rich and nontrivial ways, which are currently little understood.

The topic of the workshop is the assessment of the importance of causal concepts when dealing with complex dynamic processes.The workshop addresses various questions such as agent-based modelling, changing dyamical systems (such as found in development and evolution), event nets, and others.

The workshop will be held in JAIST, Tatsunokuchi, School of Knowledge Science,

from 14:00 to 18:00, on March 27., Thursday.