Description

SEMINAR at 12 hours by Marta Sales-Pardo (Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona) 

TITLE: Gender differences in science: Resources, impact, risk and collaboration. 

ROUND TABLE at 13h

TITLE: La dona a l'inici de la carrera científica

With the participation of:          

    Arantxa Fraile (IN2UB, Universitat de Barcelona),
    Carmen Miguel (UBICS, Universitat de Barcelona),
    Marta Sales-Pardo (Universitat Rovira i Virgili),
    Iza Romanowska (Barcelona Supercomputing Center),
    Mariona Taulé (UBICS, Universitat de Barcelona).

Organizers
UBICS

Speaker
Bernat Corominas-Murtra (Complexity Science Hub, Vienna)

Description

Standard statistical mechanics is built on critical assumptions on the internal microscopic dynamics of the system under study. Among others, it is assumed detailed balance in the internal flows, memoryless trajectories or multinomial structure of the phase space. Such assumptions lead to the well known picture where the entropic functional is Shannon entropy -derived from the much more general Boltzmann entropy- and where the statistical patterns are dominated by exponentials. Nevertheless, simple dissipative systems, for example, break the detailed balance hypothesis, path-dependent systems break the multinomial structure of the phase space and finally, most systems of current interest show fat-tailed distributions that dramatically depart from the exponential patterns. In this talk we will present the role of Sample Space Reducing (SSR) processes in providing an alternative viewpoint on the microscopic dynamics that can be generalised to dissipative or/and path dependent systems. SSR processes are stochastic processes in which the sample space reduces as long as the process unfolds. Interestingly, SSR processes offer simple analytical understanding of the origin and ubiquity of power-laws in countless path-dependent complex systems, and have a myriad of unexpected properties, among which we highlight the prominent roles of the power-law exponents -1 and -2. In addition, the statistical patterns emerging from the SSR processes are not restricted to power-laws, but entail a huge amount of well-known distributions, like log-normal, Stretched exponential, Weibull or Gomperz distributions, among others. The microscopic dynamics defined by the SSR processes also leads to a different statistical mechanics picture, in which the entropic forms are no longer Shannon-like entropies. Examples of application of the SSR processes include i) Standard dissipative driven systems, ii) Cascading/fragmentation processes, iii) Diffusion towards a target and iv) Record statistics, among others.

Speaker
Tom Brughmans (School of Archaeology, University of Oxford)

Description

What economic trends are only revealed over centuries long timescales? What aspects of human behaviour are responsible for generating such trends? The Roman Empire is the only well-documented example of economic change over centuries within a single political system. Current models in economics lack the time depth necessary to evaluate long term effects of regulation and free-market trade: Roman economy studies could inform these models. However, the ability of Roman economy studies to make such crucial contributions is currently impossible due to two issues: (1) the limited use of the available big archaeological datasets; (2) the limited development and application of computational modelling.

I will present my research efforts in tackling these two issues and making computational comparisons between the Roman economy and modern economies possible for the first time, by illustrating my work on agent-based network modelling of Roman economic integration and social networks tested against a large archaeological dataset of Roman ceramic tableware. How important were the social networks that structured the flow of commercial information around the Empire? How did family, religious, commercial and institutional community networks affect this flow? To address these questions an agent-based network model was created called MERCURY, after the Roman patron god of commerce (Brughmans and Poblome, 2016a-b).
I will further illustrate my ongoing work in elaborating on MERCURY by evaluating the effects of the Roman transport system, scaling in populations of urban settlements, and copying mechanisms of market strategies. Moreover, I will present the educational resources being prepared in my current project to enable archaeologists, historians and economists to tackle the above-mentioned issues.

References cited:
- Brughmans, T., & Poblome, J. (2016a). Roman bazaar or market economy? Explaining tableware distributions through computational modelling. Antiquity, 90(350), 393–408. doi:10.15184/aqy.2016.35
- Brughmans, T., & Poblome, J. (2016b). MERCURY: an agent-based model of tableware trade in the Roman East. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 19(1), http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/19/1/3.html

Speaker
Sonia Trigueros (University of Oxford)

Description

Nanotechnology is a new and exciting field that has the potential to transform the way medical and health solutions are being developed. In the Department of Physics, my group investigates new techniques and materials at a nanometric scale. In the Department of Zoology, my group applies this knowledge directly to know the most relevant biology on a single molecule scale and then use science and technology to solve the most urgent medical problems of the 21st century. During the talk, I will focus on describing the field of nanotechnology, current applications and the potential of future applications. I will also explain the latest basic research projects and medical applications that we are developing.