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The Conference on Complex Systems will mark its 20th anniversary during its five-day run in Exeter and warm-up event in London.
LONDON — Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute is organizing a major international conference as it returns to the U.K. for the first time in 15 years.
The Conference on Complex Systems 2024 will take place in Exeter on Sept. 2-6, with a pre-conference event happening beforehand at Northeastern’s London campus on Aug. 30-31.
About 400 researchers are expected to attend the five-day conference in the southwest of England as the longstanding event marks its 20th anniversary. The conference is the flagship annual meeting for the global complex systems research community.
Riccardo Di Clemente, an associate professor at Northeastern and conference co-chair, said the event will be a chance for researchers to meet and forge new links.
“We hope to expand our community and provide new avenues, to open attendees up to new applications of mathematical frameworks that are being applied to different topics,” he said.
“It is a conference for sharing ideas and to produce more opportunities to develop a better multidisciplinary approach to different subjects.
“We hope that researchers who come to the conference have the opportunity to broaden their research, with the possibility of looking at what people are researching in other fields.”
The gathering is being co-hosted by Northeastern University and the University of Exeter. It will be the first time it has been held in Britain since 2009, with cities in Brazil, Mexico and Spain taking turns to host it in recent years.
Nine keynote speakers — some of the biggest names in the field of complex systems — will take to the main stage between Wednesday, Sept. 4 and the closing day on Friday, Sept. 6 in Exeter.
The keynote lineup also includes a yet-to-be revealed senior award winner. Di Clemente described the award as the profession’s version of the Oscars.
During the conference, 300 academics are expected to give presentations on research papers that have been approved by a review panel of experts.
Kicking off the proceedings in Exeter will be 24 so-called “satellite” conferences covering a wide range of topics, from Complexity Research in Animal Behaviour to Computational Social Science, with the mini summits spread out across Monday, Sept. 2 and Tuesday, Sept. 3.
Devon House, Northeastern’s main teaching building at its campus on St Katherine’s Dock in London, will host the two-day event before the main conference starts in Exeter.
Organizers expect about 60 young researchers to attend, with Giovanni Petri, a London-based professor in Northeastern’s Network Science Institute, due to give a talk on how he ended up being at the forefront of the development of higher-order network science.
Di Clemente, an expert in human interactions in cities and online, said the decision to co-host the conference was about elevating the profile of the university’s Network Science Institute, which opened its London branch in 2022.
“We saw it as a way to boost the visibility of this new addition to Northeastern, with this London location,” he said.
“It is a way to let those in the field know that we have Northeastern University in London and we have this network science team and the London community of networks and systems.
“At the conference it will be easy to talk with people. They can come see us and chat with us and then we can show them, ‘This is our research, this is what we’re doing,’ and hopefully attract talent.
“This is our aim as Northeastern. The Network Science Institute is one of the main actors within the complex systems community — it is deeply involved.”