Seminar

Graduate Student Complexity Seminar & Social

Brenda Panasiak — Mon, 13 May 2019 17:17:22 +0000

Graduate Student Complexity Seminar & Social Brenda Panasiak Mon, 05/13/2019 - 13:17

New this term, University of ��ݮ��Ƶ graduate students will discuss their complex systems work during a monthly seminar. Join us for a 20 minute talk, followed by a 20-minute discussion and feedback opportunity. Afterwards, everyone who is able is welcome to meet at the Graduate House for food and socializing from 6 p.m. onward.

This month, Jude H. Kurniawan talks about 'Visualizing different perspectives of energy scenarios' on Thursday, May 16 from 4:30-5:30 in EV3 3401. We hope to see you there!

Visualizing different perspectives of energy scenarios

Jude H. Kurniawan (presenter) and Vanessa J. Schweizer

Studies of energy futures could provide roadmaps toward low-carbon energy transitions. However, many organizations conduct energy futures studies independently producing numerous energy scenarios that project vastly different futures. Stories produced by these scenarios might be very different and it will be challenging to know which scenarios we should base our decisions upon. Here we apply network analysis to visualize different perspectives of four Canadian energy futures reports. This provides an approach to ‘harmonize’ their stories. Network analysis can visualize the structures of these studies and what portion of a multi-study network each study occupies. We found studies to vary in scope, which may motivate their key findings (focussing either on the economy or the environment). Further, we subjected the full network to community detection to reveal groups of drivers that might be significant for Canadian low-carbon energy transitions. Our findings show that some drivers that are important at the global level are less significant for Canada. Some energy sub-sectors (such as transport and freight) are especially important for Canada.

Dr. Rik Logtenberg, June 26, 2025

Tammy Neal — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 14:49:12 +0000

Dr. Rik Logtenberg, June 26, 2025 Tammy Neal Mon, 06/09/2025 - 10:49

Dr. Logtenberg - June 26

We are excited to announce that Dr. Rik Logtenburg will be joining us for a special event you won't want to miss! Register with the form below to stay updated.

🎤Workshop: The Futures We Can Build: Coordinating Complexity Across Canada

📅 Date: June 26, 2025

🕒 Time: 2:30 pm

📍Location: United College of University of ��ݮ��Ƶ, Room 164 (Greenhouse) | 190 Westmount Road N. , ��ݮ��Ƶ, ON| (formerly St. Paul's College)

Stay tuned for more details soon—mark your calendars now!

Canada is at a crossroads—facing simultaneous crises in climate resilience, economic productivity, housing affordability, and institutional effectiveness. Traditional approaches often fragment efforts, limiting their impact.

How can we coordinate complexity, scale effective solutions, and catalyze systemic innovation across sectors, scales, and communities?

Join Rik Logtenberg, Director of CanAdapt, for an inspiring talk and interactive workshop demonstrating how complexity science, AI, and community-led systems thinking can accelerate Canada’s transition.

In this session, you’ll:

Learn how practical tools—systems mapping, adaptive governance frameworks, and AI-powered decision-support platforms—transform isolated efforts into coordinated action.
Engage in hands-on mapping exercises and collaborative discussions.
Identify leverage points and actionable pathways to scale resilient infrastructure and innovative governance.

Leave empowered, connected, and ready to build the shared futures Canada urgently needs.

Register for Dr. Rik Logtenberg, June 26

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WICI Speaker Series: Research Funding as a Complex System

Brenda Panasiak — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 16:40:46 +0000

WICI Speaker Series: Research Funding as a Complex System Brenda Panasiak Thu, 02/06/2025 - 11:40

WICI Speaker Series with James Shelley

Research Funding as a Complex System: Can AI Predict What Peer Reviewers Will Flag as Weaknesses in Grant Applications?

Monday, March 17th, 2025

3 - 4:30 p.m. | DC 1302

WICI external core member James Shelley returns to ��ݮ��Ƶ to talk about how complexity theory has informed his exciting new project, now a university-wide pilot at Western, on AI use in the research funding competition space.

Please join us in person or online via Zoom!

Research Funding as a Complex System: Can AI predict what peer reviews will flag as weaknesses in grant applications?

We consider the peer-review process as a complex system that appears to defy predictive modelling. Noisy and inconsistent reviewer judgments create a well-documented “black box” problem for applicants, as wide variability in human evaluation makes it difficult for researchers to preemptively identify the weaknesses—both real and perceived—that might reduce an application’s competitiveness. Assuming that the peer review process to be a highly permeable, abstruse and unpredictable system, we explore the potential efficacy of intervention strategies. We investigate the potential of leveraging LLMs to “simulate” potential reviewer critiques and hypothesize that exposing applicants to a comprehensive analysis of potential application critiques ahead of submission might mitigate some of the effects of weak inter-rater reliability. In this presentation, we report on the development of Automated Grant Feedback (AGF), a bespoke AI application that leverages historical reviewer critiques from past competitions in order to anticipate areas that adjudicators might flag as critical weaknesses. The result is a simulation of the “randomness dynamics” of peer review, specific to each unique application. As the model incorporates more historical data, its ability for identifying the same weaknesses as human reviewers increases. AGF is both a unique application of complexity theory in research administration and a demonstration of the potential benefit of using frontier AI models to provide rapid, scalable, and in-depth feedback on grant applications, offering researchers a new layer of novel feedback for refining their proposals prior to submission.

James Shelley heads Western University’s Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) Lab. This network, established in early 2020, serves as an interdisciplinary hub for the study of complexity and system scholarship at Western University, bridging every faculty on the campus. James is also a Knowledge Mobilization Specialist in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Western University. His role involves piloting strategic initiatives, designing experimental ways to share new research, and delivering professional development training.

James especially focuses on novel approaches to using data, automation and storytelling in knowledge mobilization and science communication. An autodidact at heart, he has a special interest in the overlap of complexity theory, information, narrative, and communications.

Please register in advance to attend this talk in person or online via Zoom!

WICI Speaker Series - Ira Allen

Brenda Panasiak — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 19:48:51 +0000

WICI Speaker Series - Ira Allen Brenda Panasiak Fri, 01/17/2025 - 14:48

WICI Speaker Series with Ira Allen

Witnessing Staggered Collapse: Epistemic Complexity and Systems Decomplexification

Tuesday, February 11th, 2025

1:30 - 3 p.m. | DC 1304

Ira Allen, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Writing, and Digital Media Studies at Northern Arizona University, discusses how "witnessing" offers a democratic way to navigate societal collapse as the infrastructures of our lifeworld decomplexify while individual efforts to understand that world increase in complexity.

Please join us to attend this talk in person!

Abstract:

Witnessing Staggered Collapse: Epistemic Complexity and Systems Decomplexification

It is common to understand the breakdown of large systems in terms of decomplexification. Linkage density among network nodes in a system decreases, with ever more linkages routing through centralized “supernodes.” In the context of a staggered or seriated collapse of the “CaCaCo” (carbon-capitalism-colonialism assemblage) civilizational structure, i.e., breakdown of an ever-complexifying global modernity with all its ills and ambivalent blessings, this logic holds particularly well for epistemic experience, for individual efforts to parse reality. At a time when reality itself is increasingly dynamically complex in its structuration of individual lives, both harder and more important to parse well, our overall mediation networks have grown ever less complex, with ever more epistemic power concentrated among ever fewer entities. The paradox of collapse is that as the infrastructures (both material and epistemic) of our lifeworld decomplexify, individual efforts to understand that world necessarily increase in complexity. For just one minor example, the platform capitalism breakdown or destruction of peer-to-peer communication platforms as the core of the internet, which Cory Doctorow engagingly termed “enshittification” and others speak of as capitalism’s catabolic phase, relocates epistemic complexity from networks to individuals—but leaves most of us more in the dark than ever before. A Google search can, famously, no longer be relied upon for usable results (and that’s even before the dispositions associated with generative AI). In the rise of Substackers and Twitterstorians that accompanied a widespread loss of faith in traditional epistemic sources (print and online journalism, academia, etc.), we saw one response to such impossible conditions in the emergence of epistemic supernodes, loci of information aggregation that accompanied a loss in overall density of information exchange among ordinary people consuming and producing media. Another way of saying this is to observe that the democratic epistemic promise of the early internet, what Jodi Dean critiqued already in the aughts under the heading “communicative capitalism,” is today cashing out in the intrinsically fascizing development of epistemic supernodes. It is doing so precisely as we most desperately need not superordinate mediation of the world but peer-to-peer communication both locally and globally in the old “information utopia” sense. But we ourselves, in the face of a dynamic large-scale civilizational collapse, are understandably very motivated to outsource our own epistemic capacities to trusted figures of authority, supernodes who can “know for us.” This talk takes up Davide Panagia’s scholarship on “sentimental empiricism” in working out how a turn away from “truth” and toward “witnessing” as epistemic ground might help combat the anti-democratizing tendency to lash our epistemic hopes to supernodal “knowers” (as North American liberals have, for instance, to historian Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American”). By witnessing, I mean the knowably imperfect and yet relationally transcendent effort to dispose an audience to hear some otherwise inaudible, and keenly felt, experience of the world. Witnessing cannot save us from collapse, of course. Nothing can prevent CaCaCo’s collapsing (as I detail in the recent Panic Now?). But we may live into that together in better or worse ways. For the dimension of staggered collapse that is a painful transaction between epistemic complexity and systems decomplexification, I suggest, witnessing offers a rhetorical genre that disposes us to potentially more democratic forms of life than do available alternatives.

About the speaker:

Ira Allen is associate professor of rhetoric, writing, and digital media studies in the Departments of English and Politics & International Affairs at Northern Arizona University. He teaches courses on digital argumentation, #datapolitics, rhetoric and democracy, and rhetoric and composition theory. Ira’s new book, Panic Now? Tools for Humanizing (U Tennessee P, 2024), details the value of and some strategies for judicious panic in an age of staggered collapse, following on the vision of chastened humanism developed in his first book, The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory (U Pittsburgh P, 2018). His scholarship and translations appear in such outlets as Degrowth Journal, Journal for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetoric Review, SubStance, Modern Language Notes, College Composition and Communication, Theory & Event, and Political Research Quarterly. Past popular essays on how to respond meaningfully to climate collapse and other dimensions of polycrisis appear in venues such as Jewish Journal, CommonDreams, and Local Philosophy.

WICI Speaker Series & Social: Cooperative Economics and Management

Brenda Panasiak — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 12:59:24 +0000

WICI Speaker Series & Social: Cooperative Economics and Management Brenda Panasiak Fri, 10/11/2024 - 08:59

WICI Speaker Series & Social: Cooperative Economics and Management

Together We're Bitter Cooperative Brewing 300 Mill Street, Unit 1, Kitchener

Sunday October 27, 2024 from 12 - 3 p.m.

Join WICI and our guest speaker Jerome Nikolai Warren, political economist and researcher at the Universities of Cologne and Goethe-University Frankfurt, and lead editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Cooperative Economics and Management, for a talk about complex systems in cooperative economics.

Attendees are welcome to bring guests along and all are welcome to stay after the talk for an informal social with the speaker and other WICI members. Please note the venue closes at 6 p.m. Food and drink will be available for purchase during the event.

About the speaker

Jerome Nikolai Warren is a German-American political economist and researcher, currently at the Universities of Cologne and Goethe-University Frankfurt, focused on the intersection between cooperation, sustainability and (business) networks. He is the lead editor of the forthcoming (Oct 2024) Routledge Handbook of Cooperative Economics and Management as well as of the companion volume, Global Cooperative Economics and Movements, also forthcoming from Routledge. He has conducted applied research on the cooperative economy of Italy, publishing on the evolution of Italian social and community cooperatives. Between 2022 and 2024, he was Chaire SFPI at the Belgian Royal Academy of Arts, Sciences and Letters, advising the Belgian sovereign wealth fund on its strategies in helping make Belgian firms more sustainable. In addition, he is the founder and president of the Rudolf Rocker Institute and very active in various civil society groups. He is also an avid painter and photographer.

About the venue

From academics to welders, community advocates to graphic designers, the six founding members of Together We're Bitter Co-operative Brewing came together to build a worker-owned cooperative craft brewery from scratch, with the vision of making business ownership and craft brewery more accessible to the local community. Since opening in 2016, TWB focuses on building strong relationships with community partners, maintaining a well rounded lineup of high quality, approachable beers, and making our community a better place.

WICI Speaker Series: Embracing Complexity in Sustainability Transitions

Brenda Panasiak — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 05:07:20 +0000

WICI Speaker Series: Embracing Complexity in Sustainability Transitions Brenda Panasiak Thu, 07/04/2024 - 01:07

WICI Speaker Series: Embracing Complexity in Sustainability Transitions

Monday, August 19th

10 - 11:30 a.m. in DC 1302

Dr. Enayat Moallemi, Principal Research Scientist at Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), applies a holistic view of system interactions with modelling tools and knowledge co-production methods to design and evaluate decisions for sustainability transitions in an uncertain future.

Dr. Enayat Moallemi uses modelling tools and knowledge co-production methods to design and evaluate decisions for sustainability transitions in an uncertain future. He approaches questions with a holistic view of system interactions and multi-sector dynamics between societal (poverty, equity) and environmental (energy, climate, food and land) domains, framed by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Please register below to participate in this hybrid event:

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WICI Speaker Series Registration Form - Ira Allen Feb 11th

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WICI Speaker Series with Thomas Bury

Brenda Panasiak — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 14:09:56 +0000

WICI Speaker Series with Thomas Bury Brenda Panasiak Thu, 04/11/2024 - 10:09

Critical Transitions in Cardiac Systems: Towards better prediction and understanding using deep learning

A WICI Speaker Series event co-hosted with the Department of Applied Mathematics, Mathematical Biology Seminar Series

The human heart is a complex system that can undergo a critical transition to an abnormal rhythm, known as a cardiac arrhythmia. How to predict or assess the risk of cardiac arrhythmia in individual patients with heart disease is not clear. In this talk, Dr. Thomas Bury will demonstrate how deep learning can be combined with mathematical models of the heart to (i) improve prediction of an arrhythmia known as alternans, and (ii) discover mechanisms that can lead to arrhythmia. Methods are validated in vitro using heart cell aggregates and monolayers. Bury will argue that the rapid development of cardiac monitoring techniques is giving rise to exciting opportunities at the interface of cardiology and mathematics.

Dr. Thomas Bury is an applied mathematician, data scientist, and TEDx speaker, currently working in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University. His research applies mathematics and artificial intelligence to the natural sciences, including medicine, ecology, and the climate. He is currently developing methods to better predict and classify cardiac arrhythmia.

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passcode: 613426

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WICI-WISIR Panel Discussion at Kitchener City Hall: Social Finance, Investment Readiness, and Community Wealth Building

Brenda Panasiak — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 20:39:21 +0000

WICI-WISIR Panel Discussion at Kitchener City Hall: Social Finance, Investment Readiness, and Community Wealth Building Brenda Panasiak Tue, 02/27/2024 - 15:39

WICI Director Dr. Sean Geobey brings his research team to Kitchener City Hall to share how their work with the Investment Readiness Program, in partnership with Canadian Community Economic Development Network (CCEDNet), connects with social finance and community wealth building.

Join WICI and WISIR at Kitchener City Hall on Wednesday, March 27th from 11:30 a.m. - 1 p.m. for this exciting discussion!

Dr. Sean Geobey, Director of WICI, Co-Director of WISIR, is an Associate Professor in the School of Environment, Enterprise and Development at the University of ��ݮ��Ƶ. Sean Geobey applies expertise in social innovation theory, sustainable finance, planning, governance, and decision-theory to his research, teaching, and social innovation labs.

In-person attendees will be provided a light lunch and an opportunity for informal networking at this event. The talk is open to all WICI and/or WISIR members, University of ��ݮ��Ƶ students, and the public, but guests must register to be included in the lunch!

Can't make it in person? Join remotely via Zoom or watch the recording of this talk which will be available on the WICI website following the event.

Please register below to attend:

WICI Speaker Series with Robert Axtell

Brenda Panasiak — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 18:46:29 +0000

WICI Speaker Series with Robert Axtell Brenda Panasiak Tue, 02/27/2024 - 13:46

The Organization of the U.S. Economy from a Complex Systems Perspective

Verbal descriptions of modern industrial economies are thick with details concerning the number of firms and consumers, the sizes of sectors, government activities, and so on. But formal models of such economies either compress all the real-world heterogeneity into a few statistical (econometric) equations or else focus on the incentives faced by a representative agent, simultaneously a worker, consumer, and investor. In this talk I will take a radically different approach. Using rich micro-data on U.S. firms and their employees, I will describe a computational model in which 120 million self-interested agents arrange themselves into some 6 million firms, reproducing several dozen statistical features present in the micro-data, from heavy-tailed firm sizes and skew firm ages and lifetimes to asymmetric firm growth rate distributions, emergent inter-firm networks, financial variables having peculiar scaling with firm size, and inhomogeneous distribution of firms and employees over physical space. Large-scale agent-based computing is the methodology for realizing these results. At this WICI Speaker Series event, Dr. Robert L. Axtell will argue that this ‘complexity economics’ approach offers novel insights unavailable from conventional rational expectations equilibrium models.

Please register for this free event below!

In-person attendees will be provided light refreshments and an opportunity for informal networking at the start of the event.

About the Speaker

Dr. Robert L. Axtell is a Professor of Computational Social Science at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, U.S.A. Previously, he was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution (Washington, D.C., U.S.A.) and a founding member of the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics there. He holds an interdisciplinary PhD from Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, USA).

He teaches courses on agent-based modelling, mathematical modelling, and game theory. His research is situated at the intersection of economics, behavioural game theory, and multi-agent systems computer science. His most recent research attempts to emerge a macroeconomy from tens of millions of interacting agents.

His research has been published in “Science”, “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA”, and leading field journals. Popular accounts have appeared in newspapers, magazines, books, online, on the radio and in museums. He is the developer of Sugarscape, an early attempt to integrate social science with multi-agent systems, and co-author of Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up (MIT Press 1996).

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WICI-WISIR Panel Discussion at Kitchener City Hall: Community Wealth Building

Brenda Panasiak — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 16:52:08 +0000

WICI-WISIR Panel Discussion at Kitchener City Hall: Community Wealth Building Brenda Panasiak Thu, 02/01/2024 - 11:52

WICI Director Dr. Sean Geobey brings community leaders Naudia Banton, Manager of ��ݮ��Ƶ Region Small Business Centre, Trevor Charles, Executive Director of LiftOFF, Eric Avner, President and CEO of ��ݮ��Ƶ Region Community Foundation, and Carla Leon, President & CEO of Just Like Family Home Care, together to Kitchener City Hall to share their perspectives on community wealth building.

Join WICI and WISIR at Kitchener City Hall on Wednesday, February 14th from 11:30 a.m. - 1 p.m. for this exciting discussion!

After an immersive morning in the Community Wealth Lab between University of ��ݮ��Ƶ students of Sustainable Business Models, Health, Environment, and Planning courses, students from Conestoga College, and a variety of community business leaders, the conversation will turn to a WICI-WISIR panel discussion on the topic of Community Wealth.

The Panelists:

Naudia Banton, Manager of ��ݮ��Ƶ Region Small Business Centre, is an innovative force with a background in entrepreneurship and talent management, Naudia has worked across industries such as publishing, health care, insurance, education, and manufacturing. Known for her energy and drive she helped build ��ݮ��Ƶ Region’s first Women Entrepreneurs Bootcamp, recently opened the regions newest innovation space focused on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and currently manages the ��ݮ��Ƶ Region Small Business Centre.

Trevor Charles, Executive Director of LiftOff, Professor of Biology, and Director of the ��ݮ��Ƶ Centre for Microbial Research, is a microbiologist, trained at UBC, McMaster and University of Washington with a focus on Circular Bioeconomy and Sustainable Development. Trevor is also the founder, CEO, and CSO of the bioscience start-up Metagenom Bio Life Science. LiftOFF is the ��ݮ��Ƶ region’s first and only Black-led incubator and accelerator program.

Eric Avner is President and CEO of ��ݮ��Ƶ Region Community Foundation. As the region grows to one million residents, Eric is working with the board of directors, committees and team at WRCF to ensure our communities are equitable, connected, and sustainable, and our people are thriving. Eric collaborates locally, provincially, and nationally to amplify voices, maximize resources, and co-create solutions linked to WRCF's core area of focus: building social infrastructure across ��ݮ��Ƶ region.

Carla Leon, President and CEO of Just Like Family Home Care, is an innovator, having spearheaded the first social acquisition by charities in Canada, and transforming Just Like Family into a Social Enterprise, with the majority of profits going to charities. During her career, Carla has provided leadership, coaching, mentorship, and education to thousands of entrepreneurs and small business owners. She strives to make a social impact, transforming home care across Canada for franchise owners and the families they support. She holds a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from University of British Columbia.

The discussion will be moderated by Dr. Sean Geobey, Director of WICI, Co-Director of WISIR, and Professor in the School of Environment, Enterprise and Development at the University of ��ݮ��Ƶ. Sean Geobey applies expertise in social innovation theory, sustainable finance, planning, governance, and decision-theory to his research, teaching, and social innovation labs.

In-person attendees will be provided a light lunch and an opportunity for informal networking at the start of the event. The talk is open to all WICI and/or WISIR members, University of ��ݮ��Ƶ students, and the public, but guests must register to be included in the lunch!

Can't make it in person?Stay tuned for a recording of the session, which we will share in a future newsletter, and/or join the discussion at the next Community Lab event on Wednesday, March 27th.

Registration for this event is now closed.