Research

And a list of projects.

Seemingly very different complex systems may actually display the same kind of behavior. For instance, so-called ‘criticality’ is a useful type of instability to rapidly respond to external stimuli in the brain, gene-regulatory networks, bacterial colonies, and the flocking of birds, among others. From this the picture emerges that the mechanistic details of complex systems may be irrelevant for generating such cross-domain phenomena as criticality. However, the young field of complexity science currently lacks a unified framework to study emergent phenomena without recourse to studying mechanistic details of particular complex systems, which complicates the matter and limits the rates of scientific progress. Information theory has already solved a similar problem in communication science a few decades ago, for which it was originally created. Here we argue that information theory – or an appropriately generalized version – may bring a similar revolution in the form of a unified theoretical framework in complexity science.

I also wrote an introductory page about information synergy.