Optimizing network information for human learning

This talk will focus on the most recent advancements by Prof. Bassett's lab in investigating learning from a complex science perspective, merging complex networks, behavioural data and psychological models of cognition and personality traits.

Using network science and distributional semantics to capture human creativity

Creative thinking has long been conceptualized as an associative process in semantic memory, whereby remotely related concepts are combined to form novel and valuable ideas. Network science and distributional semantics provide powerful tools to empirically test such cognitive theories of creativity. They also offer a means to quantify the novelty aspect of creativity through semantic distance—the extent to which two concepts are remotely related. In this talk, I will first review cognitive research using network science to represent semantic memory, and show how network methods have been employed to model individual differences in people’s ability to think creatively. Next, I will explore diverse applications of distributional semantics to the psychometric assessment of creativity—from assessing the creative quality of short stories to the narrative complexity of college admissions essays—and provide evidence indicating substantial agreement between these computational metrics and human creativity judgements. I will conclude by discussing some limitations of using network science, distributional semantics, and other computational methods to capture human creativity. I will also explore ethical questions of bias and fairness in automating creativity assessment, including whether computational methods are more or less biased than humans.

Empowering Cities: Health, Culture, Knowledge, and Resiliency

The future of the city is, first and foremost, about people, and those people are increasingly producing a variety of digital breadcrumbs. We will see how a creative use of four datasets can tackle hitherto unanswered research questions. We will see how to:

1. Track people's well-being at scale from aggregate records of food purchases (https://goodcitylife.org/food/project.php);

2. Quantify the cultural capital of neighbourhoods from geo-referenced pictures (https://goodcitylife.org/cultural-analytics/project.php);

3. Predict the innovation success of cities from online records of "who works where" (http://goodcitylife.org/cities4innovation/);

4. Profile the psychological resiliency of US regions to COVID-19 from tweets (http://social-dynamics.net/EpidemicPsychology/).

The Grant Writing Landscape

The stakes are high for learning how to write fundable grants. A study examining tenure and promotion criteria worldwide found that over 50% of 110 institutions listed securing grant funding as a key criterion for promotion and tenure. A study of 4,700 researchers found that 36% considered grant funding as one of the most important factors in their career. Grant writing has become an essential skill for today’s researchers.

This keynote will be an introduction to the grant writing landscape. I’ll describe how grants shape careers, grant options (e.g., government, foundation, internal grants), how grants are funded, and who key players are when you work on a fundable grant (e.g., research administrators, program officers, reviewers).

This satellite will fit within a full day. In order to keep reasonable attention spans and include as many contributed talks as possible within the above time limit, both invited talks and contributed talks will be shorter than in mainstream in-person satellites.

Contributed talks will last 10 mins + 5 mins discussion (Q&A) each, whereas invited talks will last for 15 mins + 5 mins Q&A each. There will be also a poster session (organised via Gather Town = 45 mins) and a roundtable guided by the Scientific Committee (45 mins). There will be time for roughly 12 contributed speakers (13 mins x 12 = 2 h 36 mins). Planning many slots for contributed talks provides important opportunities for research showcasing also to early career researchers, who are a key audience of the Conference on Complex Systems. We also plan to have at least two coffee breaks and organise activities in two blocks, one in the CET morning and one in the CET afternoon, in order to overlap with both the US and the Asian/Australian time zones.

The call for contributed talks is currently CLOSED. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

• Complex systems and cognition;

• Social media inquiry under the lens of cognitive science;

• Artificial intelligence, machine learning and cognitive modelling;

• Network models of the human brain and/or mind;

• Big Data, personality traits and human dynamics;

• System thinking, clinical populations and mental health;

• Creativity, fluid intelligence and cognitive skills as complex systems;

• Personality traits and complex networks.

Satellite registration and potential contributions are managed through a Google Form (see bottom page). The Committee will sift abstracts. Each Committee member will vote for acceptance or rejection of each potential contribution. Only contributions unanimously accepted by the Committee will be accepted for presentation. The Main Organiser will not vote for acceptance but will gather and coordinate votes and then notify acceptance/rejection. Authors of rejected submissions might still produce a link to a poster or an online paper that will be hosted on the satellite website.

Please send a 1-page abstract including a short narrative (between 150 and 300 words), a figure (optional) and a few key references (optional).