|Talks|

The many faces of emergence: Formalisms, opportunities, and challenges

Visiting speaker
Hybrid
Past Talk
Fernando Rosas
Lecturer in Computer Science and AI, University of Sussex
Wed, Apr 16, 2025
3:00 PM UTC
Wed, Apr 16, 2025
3:00 PM UTC
In-person
Moretown
101
4 Thomas More St
London E1W 1YW, UK
The Roux Institute
Room
101
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Network Science Institute
11th floor
177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Moretown
Room
101
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK

Talk recording

Emergence is one of the most fascinating and challenging aspects of complex systems, being also a controversial topic featuring long-standing debates and disagreements. In this talk I’ll introduce a pluralistic and pragmatic stance towards emergence that embraces multiple views while focusing on methods to establish falsifiable hypotheses and procedures to verify them. This approach will be illustrated by exploring two distinct but complementary operationalisations of emergence: (i) self-contained levels of description and (ii) synergistic interactions between constituents. The talk will review the formalisms along side applications to neuroscience and AI safety.

About the speaker
Fernando Rosas is a lecturer at the University of Sussex and also an honorary research fellow at Imperial College London and the University of Oxford. He received the B.A. degree in music composition and minor degree in philosophy, the B.Sc. degree in mathematics, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degree in engineering sciences from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He worked as postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven (Belgium), the National Taiwan University (Taiwan), and Imperial College London (UK). Dr Rosas’ work includes contributions in mathematics, engineering, physics, and neuroscience. His work has been supported by the F+ Fellowship from KU Leuven University, the Marie Słodowska-Curie IF from the EU, the Fellowship of the ICCU of the University of Kent, and PIBBSS affiliateship, and the ARIA funding agency.
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Apr 16, 2025