Online Seminar Series on Critical Transitions in Complex Systems
Welcome to the home page of the Online Seminar Series on Critical Transitions in Complex Systems, a monthly seminar series that focuses on critical transitions or "tipping points" in complex physical systems. The seminar series is jointly hosted by IIT Madras, Chennai, India, and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany.
Many complex systems such as turbulent thermo-fluid systems, climate systems, financial markets, power grids, and infectious diseases exhibit critical transitions where the system shifts abruptly from one state to another. Such critical transitions can have undesirable or even catastrophic consequences, including failure of space missions, power blackouts, extreme weather, extinction of species in ecosystems, pandemics, and sudden financial market crash.
Recent work has shown that there is indeed an architecture to such transitions. It may appear surprising that disparate phenomena such as the instability of a power grid, extreme climatic events, and a thermoacoustic transition could have anything in common. More often than not, the behavior of complex systems is independent of the details of the problem, with fundamentally different physical systems displaying similar dynamic behavior.
This seminar series plans to bring together experts from the applied and theoretical aspects of critical transitions. This series was started in September 2021, with the help of Ankit Sahay, Amitesh Roy, and the Office of Global Engagement at IIT Madras. The logistics are currently managed by Sanket Ambedkar and Ankit Sahay. We plan to have talks spread across a broad spectrum, ranging from, but not limited to, climate science to combustion to financial markets to ecology to epidemiology to neuroscience. The seminar series is aimed at disseminating state of the art in the prediction of critical transitions in these diverse fields of study, fostering international collaborations, and promoting discussion.
For more information, kindly reach out to us at ctcs.iitm@gmail.com.
Organizers
R. I. Sujith
Prof. R. I. Sujith is the D. Srinivasan Chair Professor at IIT Madras. Sujith is a leading expert on the application of dynamical systems and complex systems theory to thermoacoustic instabilities and oscillatory instabilities in general. He is an Alexander von Humboldt fellow and a Hans Fischer Senior Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at TU Munich.
Juergen Kurths
Prof. Jürgen Kurths is Senior Advisor for “Complexity Science” at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Humboldt University, Berlin. He is a leading expert in theoretical physics and complex systems science with applications to the Earth system, the human brain, and systems characterized by a high degree of interactions and nonlinearity.
Organizing Institutes
Indian Institute of Technology Madras
IIT Madras is a public technical and research university located in Chennai, India. It has been the top-ranked engineering institute in India for four consecutive years in the NIRF Rankings of 2021 put out by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India.
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research is one of the leading research institutions and part of a global network of scientific and academic institutions working on questions of global environmental change, climate impacts, and sustainable development.