Yaneer Bar-Yam (https://necsi.edu/yaneer-bar-yam), the head of NECSI (the New England Complex Systems Institute), will give us an update on the current COVID-19 pandemic and describe analyses and modeling of the dynamics of the epidemic and relevant social interventions to predict/anticipate its course and advise all levels of government, communities, corporations and individuals. You can see his thoughts on this at https://www.endcoronavirus.org/ and https://necsi.edu/corona-virus-pandemic.

He will also describe some of the efforts of a volunteer community of thousands he established, including engineers and scientists, teaming together to help fight this disease. You can register to join the effort now at https://www.endcoronavirus.org .

Prof. Yaneer Bar-Yam received his SB and PhD in physics from MIT in 1978 and 1984 respectively. Since the late 1980s he has contributed to founding the field of complex systems science, introducing fundamental mathematical rigor, real world application, and educational programs for new concepts and insights of this field. In developing new mathematical methods and in their application he has published on a wide range of scientific and real world problems ranging from cell biology to the global financial crisis.

His development of multiscale representations as a generalization of renormalization group addressed the limitations of calculus and statistics in the study of nonlinear and network system dependencies in collective behaviors. His recent work quantitatively analyzes the origins and impacts of market crashes, social unrest, ethnic violence, military conflict and pandemics, the structure and dynamics of social networks, as well as the bases of creativity, panic, evolution and altruism. He is the author of over 200 research papers in professional journals, including Science, Nature, PNAS, American Naturalist, and Physical Review Letters, has 3 patents, and has given 175 invited presentations. His work on the causes of the global food crisis was cited among the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2011 by Wired magazine.

He is the author of two books: a textbook Dynamics of Complex Systems, and Making Things Work, which applies complex systems science to solving problems in healthcare, education, systems engineering, international development, and ethnic conflict. He has taught the concepts and methods of complex systems science to over 2,000 graduate students, professionals and executives. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. He is currently Research Scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory.

He chaired the International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS) and is the managing editor of a Springer book series on complexity. His work has been described in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, Die Zeit, Le Monde, Time, The Atlantic Monthly, Scientific American, Wired, Fast Company, Forbes, Slate, Mother Jones, and Vice, among others. He has appeared on ABC News, Canada’s CTV, RT, BBC Radio, NPR Radio, and other national media outlets. His scientific visualizations received recognition as “best of” from Wired in 2011 and 2013, and from Motherboard in 2013.

Register at https://event.on24.com/wcc/r/2267251/AB687DDE565303E51DEB9DB0389236C4
to get a link to the webcast emailed to you.

This joint meeting of the Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM will be online only due to the worldwide pandemic emergency.