Events & Features - Academic Events
Friday, November 25, 2011 - 15:00 - 16:00
Main Foyer, Environment 3 Building, University of Waterloo
To celebrate the new Graduate Diploma Program in Social Innovation, SiG@Waterloo will be hosting an official launch event in the new Environment 3 building, University of Waterloo.
This event is scheduled to take place on Friday, November 25, 2011 from 3-4pm with the following special guests:
Mark Weber, Director of the Graduate Diploma in Social Innovation program
André Roy, Dean, Faculty of Environment, University of Waterloo
Frances Westley, J.W. McConnell Chair in Social Innovation,...
Monday, March 28, 2011 - 19:00 - 21:00
Optometry Building, Room OPT 347
To register email: scienceevents@uwaterloo.ca or call 519-888-4567 ext. 31083
The University of Waterloo is holding a public talk to explore Japan's earthquake and tsunami disaster.
The effects and impact of the recent Japanese earthquake and tsunami disaster will be explored by a panel of experts in a public talk at the University of Waterloo.
On March 11, an earthquake measuring 9.0 Mw on the moment magnitude scale (the newer of two common seismic scales) rocked Japan in T'hoku, the northeastern area of the country. The earthquake triggered tsunami waves up to 10...
Friday, March 11, 2011 (All day) - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 (All day)
Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona
Resilience, Innovation, and Sustainability:
Navigating the Complexities of Global Change
Second International Science and Policy Conference, Tempe, Arizona, USA
March 11-16, 2011, Arizona State University
The aim of "Resilience, Innovation and Sustainability: Navigating the Complexities of Global Change'' is to advance understanding of the relationships among resilience, vulnerability, innovation and sustainability. It will do so by bringing together scientists to share their work on the...
Thursday, February 17, 2011 - 12:00 - 13:30
EV1-221, Faculty of Environment, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, Ontario
The ENV Research Seminar Committee invites you to hear this week’s speaker, Dr. Mark Weber:
All groups, movements and organizations face a fundamental problem: They need cooperation but their members have incentives to free ride. Empirical research on this problem has often been discouraging, and economic models suggest that solutions are unlikely or unstable. In contrast, I will present a model and a series of studies that show that an unwaveringly consistent contributor can effectively...
Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - 14:00 - 16:00
Network science is an interdisciplinary endeavor, with methods and applications drawn from across the natural, social, and information sciences. In addition to theoretical developments, electronic databases currently provide detailed records of human communication and interaction patterns, offering novel avenues to map and explore the structure of social networks.
In this WICI event, Jukka-Petta Onnela spoke about the structure of a social network based on the cell phone communication patterns...
Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - 14:00 - 16:00
The Burgundy Room at The University Club, University of Waterloo
Please RSVP at http://wici-ellard.eventbrite.com/
In the final WICI seminar of the term, Colin Ellard will discuss connections between psychology and the design of the built environment. Ellard, is an experimental psychologist at the University of Waterloo, the director of its Research Laboratory for Immersive Virtual Environments and an international expert in the psychology of navigation.
In this talk, Ellard will describe how a scientific approach to the connection between human beings and the spaces and places they inhabit influences the...
Thursday, November 4, 2010 - 14:00 - 16:00
Tatham Centre, Room TC1112, University of Waterloo
FREE to Attend: RSVP with Eventbrite.
From DNA to Complex Cognition: How We Learn, Discover, and Create the World
Creating and discovering knowledge are the cores of our Cognitive, Social, and Economic worlds. Understanding and tapping the mechanisms underlying these abilities have been the driving force of research in my laboratory for the past 20 years. We have used a variety of methodologies, ranging from analyses of DNA polymorphisms and the changing of expression levels of DNA, to imaging brains (fMRI, MEG, NIRS), and to...
Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - 14:00 - 16:00
Location: Burgundy Room, University Club, University of Waterloo
FREE to Attend: RSVP with Eventbrite.
FREE to Attend: RSVP with Eventbrite.
Communities often face the following problem: to collectively achieve a ranking of their members according to some notion of merit using only the opinions of those members and without any pre-existing ranking. If a society wished to appoint only the most meritorious of its members to a particular set of offices --- for instance, the most trustworthy to decision-makers, the most fair to jurors, the most expert to policy-makers--- they would face an...
Thursday, October 7, 2010 - 08:30 - 16:30
Math and Computing, MC 2016, University of Waterloo
FREE to Attend: Enroll in course by contacting Catherine Mombourquette at info@wici.ca
Simulation-Based Engineering of Complex Systems
This introduction treats complex systems as interacting, concurrent processes and introduces a method, a graphical system description language, and a computer-aided design tool for analyzing them. It demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach through several illustrative examples.
The toolset used, ExtendSim with the OpEMCSS library, gives systems practitioners the ability to experiment with complex, context-sensitive interactions and...
Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - 14:00 - 16:00
Burgundy Room, University Club, University of Waterloo
FREE to Attend: RSVP by contacting Catherine Mombourquette at info@wici.ca
Simulation-Based Engineering of Complex Systems
This introduction treats complex systems as interacting, concurrent processes and introduces a method, a graphical system description language, and a computer-aided design tool for analyzing them. It demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach through several illustrative examples.
The toolset used, ExtendSim with the OpEMCSS library, gives systems practitioners the ability to experiment with complex, context-sensitive interactions and...
Monday, March 22, 2010 - 14:00 - 16:00
Tatham Centre, Room TC2218, University of Waterloo
FREE to Attend: RSVP by contacting Catherine Mombourquette at 519.888.4567, ext. 84490 or cmombour@uwaterloo.ca
Testing Institutional Arrangements via Agent-Based Modeling: A U.S. Electricity Market
The recent economic crisis has led to calls for a comprehensive restructuring of U.S. financial, energy, and health care systems. Critics worry that the restructuring of these complex systems could produce unintended consequences, resulting in lower rather than higher efficiency and reliability. Given these concerns, pre-testing of proposed changes is eminently desirable, but also exceedingly difficult. This...
Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 15:00 - 16:30
Tatham Centre, Room TC1112, University of Waterloo
FREE to Attend: RSVP by contacting Catherine Mombourquette at 519.888.4567, ext. 84490 or info@wici.ca
Managing water quality and quantity in a changing climate: A wildfire case study in the Canadian Rocky Mountains
The contemporary increase in frequency and severity of wildfires in western North America can be considered a current manifestation of climate change in North America. The Southern Rockies Watershed Project was established shortly after the 2003 Lost Creek wildfire (> 210 km2) to describe both the early magnitude, and subsequent trajectory of recovery of a broad range of watershed...
Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 14:00 - 16:00
Tatham Centre, Room TC2218, University of Waterloo
FREE to Attend: RSVP by contacting Catherine Mombourquette at 519.888.4567, ext. 84490 or cmombour@uwaterloo.ca
Information Technology and Resilience in the Anthropocene - Can Information Technology Really Help Save the Planet?
The possible implications of abrupt climate change, "planetary boundaries" and the failure of international institutions to deal with multiple interacting global crises have gained considerable scientific and political attention over the last years. Few sustainability scientists however, have elaborated another important global trend: the explosive evolution of, and cascading...
Monday, February 22, 2010 - 14:00 - 16:00
Tatham Centre, room TC2218, University of Waterloo
FREE to Attend: RSVP by contacting Catherine Mombourquette at 519.888.4567, ext. 84490 or cmombour@uwaterloo.ca
Open Source Democracy: Can collective intelligence, mass collaboration, and large-scale problem solving using open architectures redefine democratic engagement in the 21st Century?
Mark Tovey, Michael Nielsen and Hassan Masum will join WICI in exploring the possibilities that information and communication technologies are providing for the creation of new types of political engagement, problem solving and collective decision-making. We will be exploring issues such as collective intelligence...
Tuesday, January 19, 2010 - 14:00 - 16:00
Tatham Centre (TC1112), University of Waterloo
RSVP by contacting Catherine Mombourquette at 519.888.4567, ext. 84490 or cmombour@uwaterloo.ca
David Robinson, Ivan Filion, and Kirsten Robinson
A major restoration project for Georgian Bay calls for re-imagining the ecosystems management strategy and its relationship to the local economy. The problem is complicated, and the solutions are contested. It is an opportunity to apply complexity theory?
Slightly smaller than Lake Ontario, and entirely within Canada's boundaries, Georgian Bay is often called the Sixth Great Lake. The human-ecosystem interaction of the region faces challenges...
Tuesday, January 12, 2010 - 19:00 - 21:00
Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, 25 Caroline Street N, Waterloo, ON
Call us at 519-888-4545 or email nicola@alternativesjournal.ca to reserve tickets - $10
On Tuesday, January 12, three of Canada's foremost "ecollectuals" will burn up the podium with a fast-paced discussion that will challenge your eco-ideas and test your eco-vocabulary. Thomas Homer-Dixon (UW), Robert Gibson (UW) and Stephen Bocking (Trent U) will face off in an epic environmental debate.
"Ecology will be the master science of the 21st century," is Homer-Dixon's unequivocal opinion.
To which Bocking cautions, "...a science too closely integrated with power courts its own...
Monday, December 7, 2009 - 12:00 - 13:30
TC 2218, Tatham Centre, University of Waterloo
RSVP by contacting Catherine Mombourquette at 519.888.4567, ext. 84490 or cmombour@uwaterloo.ca
One thing that we can usually count on to get better with time is technology. But is the rate of technological improvement predictable? The problem of global warming makes this a pressing question: Over the coming years we are likely to invest trillions of dollars on green energy technologies. Understanding the rate of improvement of different technologies could potentially allow us to invest more wisely, save vast sums of money, and achieve a carbon neutral world more quickly. I will compare...
Monday, November 23, 2009 - 15:00 - 16:30
Laurel Room, South Campus Hall, University of Waterloo
RSVP by contacting Catherine Mombourquette at 519.888.4567, ext. 84490 or cmombour@uwaterloo.ca
The presentation will present field-oriented experimental architecture installations including the recent Hylozoic Soil and Epithelium series, composed of densely massed flexible networks fitted with interactive kinetic components. Drawing from the interactive behaviours of these installations, discussion about implications of interactive architecture will be offered. The argument pursues mutually dependent post-humanist relationships.
Speaker Profile
Philip Beesley is an associate professor in...
Friday, November 20, 2009 (All day) - Tuesday, November 24, 2009 (All day)
Colloquium and Workshops
Introductory Workshops: Friday, Nov. 20
Colloquium: Friday, Nov. 20 and Saturday, Nov. 21
Interaction Workshop 1: Sunday, Nov. 22
SiG Seminar: Monday, Nov. 23
Interaction Workshop 2: Tuesday, Nov. 24
All events are free and open to the public
Register to secure places in limited-space workshops (see details below)
Presented by :
Arch 692, Waterloo Architecture
Social Innovation Generation (SiG), University of Waterloo
University of...
Tuesday, November 10, 2009 - 12:00 - 13:30
Laurel Room, South Campus Hall, University of Waterloo
RSVP by contacting Catherine Mombourquette at 519.888.4567, ext. 84490 or cmombour@uwaterloo.ca
Cities can be thought of as analogues to peaks on a dynamic fitness landscape. Brad Bass will discuss this concept theoretically and illustrate this idea using a geographical analysis of the U.S. Patent Database. This analysis also illustrates networked, authoritative and chaotic search strategies and sheds light on the stability of the central place structure. It could lead to a revitalization of central place theory, a theory that while was once one of the cornerstones of a geographic...
Monday, October 26, 2009 - 15:30 - 17:00
Laurel Room, South Campus Hall, University of Waterloo
RSVP by contacting Catherine Mombourquette at 519.888.4567, ext. 84490 or cmombour@uwaterloo.ca
"Is our Concept of Moral Responsibility Newtonian?" Briefly, I argue that while we have come to appreciate that certain issues facing us today are genuinely complex, not merely complicated, we therefore need to build and mobilize interventions, whether epidemiological, architectural or economic, which are themselves sufficiently informed by complexity and thus, able to "meet" their intended objects of concern. We have not put as much time and effort into rethinking the basic concepts with which...
Thursday, October 1, 2009 - 12:00 - 13:30
Burgundy Room, University Club, University of Waterloo
RSVP by contacting Catherine Mombourquette at 519.888.4567, ext. 84490 or cmombour@uwaterloo.ca
Given increasing human appropriation of land, the alterations in land-based natural capital that result, and the subsequent decline ecosystem service generation that often follows, there is an increasing need for modeling tools to understand linkages between the drivers of land-use change and their socioeconomic and ecological impacts. Recognizing the complexity inherent in coupled human-natural systems, scientists have begun to apply theories and tools from complexity science to this modeling...
Tuesday, April 14, 2009 - 14:00 - 16:00
University Club, University of Waterloo
For WICI to realize its considerable potential it should strive to draw upon a cadre of people who are each familiar with several quite different approaches to understanding complex systems as well as specialists who are highly accomplished in particular complex phenomena of special interest to them. Together, they can begin to relate the variety of approaches, especially across the great divides between the natural science/mathematics and the social science/history contexts of the different...
Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - 14:00 - 16:00
University Club, University of Waterloo
In this talk I explain and study the basic model of neoclassical theory of market equilibrium, which is the Arrow-Debreu model. I raise the basic question that physicists ask when confronting a new system, which is what are the symmetries? I find a simple argument that many markets will have a large number of equilibria. I also motivate a principle of gauge invariance, originally introduced into economics by Malaney and Weinstein and explain some of its consequences.
Speaker Profile
Lee Smolin...
Wednesday, February 25, 2009 - 14:00 - 16:00
University Club, University of Waterloo
This presentation explores the applicability of self-organized criticality to the study of innovation in global governance. After introducing the concept of self-organized criticality, the discussion will turn to its utility for studying social systems. Matthew Hoffmann will present both an agent-based model of the evolution of social norms and empirical illustrations of innovations in global governance drawn from work on climate change and multilateral treaty-making.
Speaker Profile
Matthew...
Tuesday, February 10, 2009 - 14:00 - 16:00
University Club, University of Waterloo
Social innovation is an initiative, product or process or program that profoundly changes the basic routines, resource and authority flows or beliefs of any social system. Successful social innovations have durability and broad impact. Achieving durability and scale is a dynamic process that requires both emergence of opportunity and deliberate agency, and a connection between the two. Frances Westley will discuss how disruptive social innovations can address seemingly intractable social...
Wednesday, January 28, 2009 - 14:00 - 16:00
University Club, University of Waterloo
Keith Hipel will discuss his experiences using graph theory and conflict analysis to talk about problems in the environment and make some links to complexity theory. The key goal of this research is to employ a Systems Engineering approach to conflict resolution to clearly identify the ubiquitous conflict taking place at the local, national and global levels between the basic values underlying trading agreements and those principles providing the foundations for environmental stewardship. The...
Tuesday, January 13, 2009 - 14:00 - 16:00
University Club, University of Waterloo
Global warming. Emergent diseases. Infoglut. International financial instability. Mega-terrorism. Are the problems we are confronting as individuals, societies, and a species becoming more difficult? If so, can we solve them? Thomas Homer-Dixon will address these questions by drawing on his research on social adaptation to complex change. He will show how and why our requirement for solutions to our complex problems is soaring, and he will explore cognitive, scientific, economic, and political...
Thursday, December 11, 2008 - 14:00 - 16:00
University Club, University of Waterloo
Complexity science is impacting healthcare across the western world. In the UK, USA and Canada, the healthcare sector is looking to complexity for insights to address the clinical, public policy, and organizational challenges of healthcare. In this session, we will look at these three domains and outline how complexity science has been applied or, at least, discussed. In each domain, we will describe how complexity science has changed behaviours, decision making, and design. And we will compare...
Wednesday, November 19, 2008 - 14:00 - 16:00
University Club, University of Waterloo
Why have most scientists come to believe that global warming is caused by human activity? Why do some politicians such as Sarah Palin resist this conclusion? Belief, change and resistance can be explained by neurocomputational models of explanatory and emotional coherence. Minds and societies are complex, multilevel systems that can be changed by intervention on feedback loops at multiple levels.
Speaker Profile
Paul Thagard is Professor of Philosophy, with cross appointment to Psychology and...
Monday, October 27, 2008 - 14:00 - 16:00
University Club, University of Waterloo
In this seminar, Stuart Kauffman, one of the founders of the field of complex systems, will explain the principles which he proposes underlie innovation and economic growth. He will illustrate these principles with real world examples from his experience in industry and the academe.
Speaker Profile
Stuart A. Kauffman is a professor at the University of Calgary with a shared appointment between biological sciences, physics, and astronomy. He is also the leader of the Institute for Biocomplexity...
