Collaborations and projects

The staff members of the Applied Group have ongoing active research collaborations with staff from leading complexity research institutes in the world, such as the Santa Fe Institute for Complex Systems in New Mexico, the Max-Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, and the Center of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems of the Australian Research Council, as well as with research groups in Amherst (Massachusetts), Austin, Berlin, Budapest, Catania, Chemnitz, Darmstadt, Dresden, Harvard, Jülich, Melbourne, Montreal, Nancy, New York (Rockefeller and NYU), Orono (Maine), Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Saarbrücken, San Francisco, Stellenbosch, Sydney, and Vancouver.

  • Energy infrastructure has gone through unprecedented change in recent decades and has resulted in the emergence of enormous networks that transcend national borders and even continental shores. The EPSRC funded project RAVEN aims at capturing essential measures, parameters and qualitative behaviours which may help us to gain insights into the limits of operation of these critical infrastructure networks, as well as to design the 'smart' grids of the future in a robust way.
  • The dynamical systems group at QMUL coordinates MANMADE, the EU network on "Diagnosing vulnerability, emergent phenomena, and volatility in man-made networks". Participants in the network are the Collegium Budapest (Gabor Vattay), the Macedonian Academy of Science and Arts, (Ljupco Kocarev), the Universita Carlo Cattaneo (Fernanda Strozzi), and the European Commission Joint Research Centre. The aim of the network is to analyse real-world infrastructure systems with a view to aiding day-to-day and emergency planning of critical infrastructures. The projects will assemble, develop, and apply complementary mathematical methods to analyse large, man-made multi-element infrastructural systems that exhibit complex behaviour. The themes running across the individual subject areas will be vulnerability, volatility, and emergent phenomena.
  • Christian Beck coordinates an EPSRC funded project on "time scale separation in superstatistical complex systems" (2008-2011). The project aims at a generalistion of Statistical Mechanics for a large variety of complex systems, such as turbulence, solar flares, cosmic rays, or share price evolution.
  • Franco Vivaldi is co-investigator (with John Roberts at UNSW, Sydney) in the ARC funded research project "Algebraic Dynamics" (2007-2009).
  • Rainer Klages received a startup grant from EPSRC for bringing together a new team of biologists and mathematicians, which is working on the dynamics of foraging bumblebees under varying environmental conditions (2009-2010).