Training students at master and PhD level on the topics of frontier research fields demands understanding what and how to teach. Moreover, in most cases such topics have an interdisciplinary character and this makes such questions even more difficult to be answered. Nowadays, one of the most important examples of such topics is the so called "Science of Complexity". Its interdisciplinary character is manifest, although the role played by physicists in establishing and enforcing this new research field has been crucial in many respects, mainly because a great deal of problems have to be tackled by statistical methods, borrowed from theoretical physics and applied mathematics.
This workshhop aims at discussing the organization of advanced scientific training in nonequilibriun statistical physics. Such a topic is of primary interest not only for physics (e.g., transport processes, granular material, glasses), but also for genetics, population biology, immunology, sociology, econometry, dynamics on distributed networks (e.g. neural structures, internet, communication and social networks). In fact, this is the scientific topic with highest interdisciplinary potential, and the application and extension of its methods are expected to produce fruitful crossfertilization effects among the above mentioned research fields. On the other hand we are facing the problem of having at disposal effective teaching tools for training young scientists that are involved in such a wide spectrum of research problems. This is certainly one of the major cultural challanges for the next decades.
The workshop will contain a series of invited lectures by senior scientists, which are experts on this topic as teachers as well as researchers. Moreover, we plan to have in the audience also some young scientists at master and PhD level, whose training mainly concerns the topic of the workshop. They are expected to profit of the lectures, to participate the following debate, to contribute to the plenary discussions from the point of view of "pupils" and also to give short oral contributions (see Participation for more details).
During the workshop the organizers, Roberto Livi and Paolo Politi, will present the book "Nonequilibrium Statistical Physics: A Modern Perspective" edited by Cambridge University Press, appeared in October 2017.
During the workshop will be organised a public conference, where the main features and perspectives of the "Science of Complexity" will be illustrated to the public, in particular to teachers, students and the interested population. This conference will be held in Italian, at variance with the workshop, whose scientific language is, as usual, english.