The Brunel Complexity Community
Econo-complexity | Engineering Complexity | Socio-complexity | Tools & Techniques | EventsThe Brunel Complexity Community is a diverse and burgeoning group of people drawn from many schools across campus. Many staff are working on a fascinating range of Complexity topics from the scheduling of aircraft, through studying consumer behaviour, to the handling of information in urban battlefield simulations. Our work crosses the boundaries of engineering, economics, health, ICT, design, sociology, computer science, and business. Not all the work is under-pinned with modelling and mathematical tools, but when that's required the Maths Dept have an impressive array of techniques to help you.
Gradually, we are bringing together expertise from different schools to solve genuinely multi-disciplinary problems. This will often require translation of research culture and methodology between those with disparate backgrounds. Many of you already think of yourselves as 100% Complexity specialists, but there are many more for whom Complexity is a minority activity. The aim of our community is to help people start new areas of their field in which the techniques of Complexity are required. This will bring more people into Complexity and allow us to solve some really interesting problems.
The common link between everyone is the desire to solve practical problems, design functional systems - to apply the tools and techniques of Complexity Science. Ultimately, we're looking to find ways of manipulating Complex Systems to do what we want, rather than observing and explaining patterns of behaviour. If we can manage to build our community to function in the way we envisage, this will be a unique collection of people working in the applications of Complexity Science.
If you're interested in joining our community, get in touch with:
Geoff Rodgers (Pro-Vice-Chancellor Research / Graduate School) at g.j.rodgers@brunel.ac.uk
Or
Diane Smith (Graduate School) at diane.smith@brunel.ac.uk
Whilst there's plenty of overlap between areas (it's Complex after all!), roughly speaking, most of us can be thought of as working in one of four areas
