Speaker: Brennan Klein
Title: A Network Science for Complexity & Society
Abstract: Complex networks are the syntax of complex systems, and they give us a unique ability to understand a range of phenomena across nature and society. This broad field is reflected across my research program, which spans projects that are highly theoretical in nature to others that are more applied—particularly focused on topics in public health, public safety, and justice. This talk will discuss these two parallel research thrusts. In the first part of the talk, I will describe a theoretical and computational approach that allows us to ask whether a given network captures the most informative scale for understanding the underlying dynamics of a system. Here, I present a series of papers that ask why we so often see multi-scale, higher order structure emerge in complex systems, based on a concept known as causal emergence. In the second part of the talk, I highlight how these same ideas can be used to ask new questions about structural inequalities in society—ranging from the disparate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic to racial disparities in the U.S. criminal legal system. I will close with a short discussion about how these two broad areas of research each contribute to my larger goal of creating a more useful network science, one that provides the appropriate set of tools to study questions of complexity and society.
